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EMERSON

AND OTHER ESSAYS

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1898

\1&

WLnttimitu Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

CONTENTS

Page

Emerson 3

Walt Whitman . . . in

A Study of Romeo 131

Michael Angelo's Sonnets 153

The Fourth Canto of the Inferno . . 173

Robert Browning 185

Robert Louis Stevenson 217

EMERSON

" Leave this hypocritical prating about the
masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade,
pernicious in their demands and influence, and
need not to be flattered, but to be schooled.
I wish not to concede anything to them, but
to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
draw individuals out of them. The worst of
charity is that the lives you are asked to pre-
serve are not worth preserving. Masses !
The calamity is the masses. I do not wish
any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely,
sweet, accomplished women only, and no
shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking
million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If
government knew how, I should like to see
it check, not multiply the population.
When it reaches its true law of action, every
man that is born will be hailed as essential.
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us
have the considerate vote of single men spoken
on their honor and their conscience."
3

EMERSON

This extract from The Conduct of Life
gives fairly enough the leading thought of
Emerson's life. The unending warfare be-
tween the individual and society shows us in
each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or
a musician who exalts and deifies the individual,
and leads us back again to the only object
which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which
can permanently excite it, — the character of a
man. It is surprising to find this identity of
content in all great deliverances. The only
thing we really admire is personal liberty.
Those who fought for it and those who en-
joyed it are our heroes.

But the hero may enslave his race by bring-
ing in a system of tyranny ; the battle-cry of
freedom may become a dogma which crushes
the soul ; one good custom may corrupt the
world. And so the inspiration of one age
becomes the damnation of the next. This
crystallizing of life into death has occurred so
often that it may almost be regarded as one
of the laws of progress.

Emerson represents a protest against the
tyranny of democracy. He is the most
recent example of elemental hero-worship.
His opinions are absolutely unqualified ex-
cept by his temperament. He expresses
a form of belief in the importance of the
4

EMERSON

individual which is independent of any per-
sonal relations he has with the world. It
is as if a man had been withdrawn from the
earth and dedicated to condensing and em-
bodying this eternal idea — the value of the
individual soul — so vividly, so vitally, that
his words could not die, yet in such illusive
and abstract forms that by no chance and by
no power could his creed be used for pur-
poses of tyranny. Dogma cannot be ex-
tracted from it. Schools cannot be built on
it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it
evaporates and leaves nothing. Emerson was
so afraid of the letter that killeth that he would
hardly trust his words to print. He was as-
sured there was no such thing as literal truth,
but only literal falsehood. He therefore re-
sorted to metaphors which could by no chance
be taken literally. And he has probably
succeeded in leaving a body of work which
cannot be made to operate to any other end
than that for which he designed it. If this be
true, he has accomplished the inconceivable
feat of eluding misconception. If it be true,
he stands alone in the history of teachers ; he
has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed
blessing behind him.

The signs of those times which brought
forth Emerson are not wholly undecipherable.
5

EMERSON

They are the same times which gave rise to
every character of significance during the
period before the war. Emerson is indeed
the easiest to understand of all the men of his
time, because his life is freest from the tangles
and qualifications of circumstance. He is a
sheer and pure type and creature of destiny,
and the unconsciousness that marks his devel-
opment allies him to the deepest phenomena.
It is convenient, in describing him, to use
language which implies consciousness on his
part, but he himself had no purpose, no theory
of himself; he was a product.

The years between 1820 and 1830 were the
most pitiable through which this country has
ever passed. The conscience of the North
was pledged to the Missouri Compromise, and
that Compromise neither slumbered nor slept.
In New England, where the old theocratical
oligarchy of the colonies had survived the
Revolution and kept under its own water-
locks the new flood of trade, the conserva-
tism of politics reinforced the conservatism
of religion ; and as if these two inquisitions
were not enough to stifle the soul of man,
the conservatism of business self-interest
was superimposed. The history of the con-
flicts which followed has been written by the
radicals, who negligently charge up to self-
6

EMERSON

interest all the resistance which establishments
offer to change. But it was not solely self-
interest, it was conscience that backed the
Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally,
so strongly as in New England. It was con-
science that made cowards of us all. The
white-lipped generation of Edward Everett
were victims, one might even say martyrs, to
conscience. They suffered the most terrible
martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom
which injured their immortal volition and
dried up the springs of life. If it were not
that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip
into real life, I do not know what more awful
subject for a poem could have been found than
that of the New England judge enforcing the
fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem
the heroism of these men has been forgotten,
the losing heroism of conservatism. It was
this spiritual power of a committed conscience
which met the new forces as they arose, and it
deserves a better name than these new forces
afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits
of these heavy conditions could be seen in the
life of the people. Free speech was lost.

" I know no country/' says Tocqueville,

who was here in 1831, " in which there is

so little independence of mind and freedom

of discussion as in America." Tocqueville

EMERSON

recurs to the point again and again. He can-
not disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged
his whole philosophy and his book. The
timidity of the Americans of this era was a
thing which intelligent foreigners could not
understand. Miss Martineau wrote in her
Autobiography: "It was not till months
afterwards that I was told that there were two
reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea]
as elsewhere. One reason was that I had
avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that I
was disappointed in an oration of Mr.
Everett's ; and another was that I had pub-
licly condemned the institution of slavery. I
hope the Boston people have outgrown the
childishness of sulking at opinions not in
either case volunteered, but obtained by pres-
sure. But really, the subservience to opinion
at that time seemed a sort of mania."

The mania was by no means confined to
Boston, but qualified this period of our history
throughout the Northern States. There was
no literature. " If great writers have not at
present existed in America, the reason is very
simply given in the fact that there can be no
literary genius without freedom of opinion,
and freedom of opinion does not exist in
America," wrote Tocqueville. There were
no amusements, neither music nor sport
8

EMERSON

nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. The
whole life of the community was a life of the
intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay the
weight of intellectual tyranny. The pressure
kept on increasing, and the suppressed forces
kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show
what gigantic power was needed to keep con-
servatism dominant, the Merchant Province
put forward Daniel Webster.

The worst period of panic seems to have
preceded the anti-slavery agitations of 1831,
because these agitations soon demonstrated
that the sky did not fall nor the earth yawn
and swallow Massachusetts because of Mr.
Garrison's opinions, as most people had sin-
cerely believed would be the case. Some
semblance of free speech was therefore grad-
ually regained.

Let us remember the world upon which the
young Emerson's eyes opened. The South
was a plantation. The North crooked the
hinges of the knee where thrift might follow
fawning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit,
a malicious caricature, — founded on fact.
This time of humiliation, when there was no
free speech, no literature, little manliness, no
reality, no simplicity, no accomplishment,
was the era of American brag. We flattered
the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves.
9

EMERSON

We were over-sensitive, insolent, and cring-
ing. As late as 1845, G. P. Putnam, a most
sensible and modest man, published a book
to show what the country had done in the
field of culture. The book is a monument
of the age. With all its good sense and good
humor, it justifies foreign contempt because
it is explanatory. Underneath everything
lay a feeling of unrest, an instinct, — " this
country cannot permanently endure half slave
and half free," — which was the truth, but
which could not be uttered.

So long as there is any subject which men
may not freely discuss, they are timid upon
all subjects. They wear an iron crown and
talk in whispers. Such social conditions
crush and maim the individual, and through-
out New England, as throughout the whole
North, the individual was crushed and
maimed.

The generous youths who came to man-
hood between 1820 and 1830, while this
deadly era was maturing, seem to have under-
gone a revulsion against the world almost
before touching it ; at least two of them
suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still
boys sitting on benches in school, and came
forth advancing upon this old society like
gladiators. The activity of William Lloyd
10

EMERSON

Garrison, the man of action, preceded by
several years that of Emerson, who is his
prophet. Both of them were parts of one
revolution. One of Emerson's articles of
faith was that a man's thoughts spring from
his actions rather than his actions from his
thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds
good for society at large. Perhaps all truths,
whether moral or economic, must be worked
out in real life before they are discovered by
the student, and it was therefore necessary
that Garrison should be evolved earlier than
Emerson.

The silent years of early manhood, during
which Emerson passed through the Divinity
School and to his ministry, known by few,
understood by none, least of all by himself,
were years in which the revolting spirit of an
archangel thought out his creed. He came
forth perfect, with that serenity of which we
have scarce another example in history, —
that union of the man himself, his beliefs, and
his vehicle of expression that makes men
great because it makes them comprehensible.
The philosophy into which he had already
transmuted all his earlier theology at the
time we first meet him consisted of a very
simple drawirfg together of a few ideas, all of
which had long been familiar to the world.
ii

EMERSON

It is the wonderful use he made of these ideas,
the closeness with which they fitted his soul,
the tact with which he took what he needed,
like a bird building its nest, that make the
originality, the man.

The conclusion of Berkeley, that the ex-
ternal world is known to us only through our
impressions, and that therefore, for aught we
know, the whole universe exists only in our
own consciousness, cannot be disproved. It
is so simple a conception that a child may
understand it; and it has probably been
passed before the attention of every thinking
man since Plato's time. The notion is in it-
self a mere philosophical catch or crux to
which there is no answer. It may be true.
The mystics made this doctrine useful. They
were not content to doubt the independent
existence of the external world. They ima-
gined that this external world, the earth, the
planets, the phenomena of nature, bore some
relation to the emotions and destiny of the
soul. The soul and the cosmos were some-
how related, and related so intimately that the
cosmos might be regarded as a sort of pro-
jection or diagram of the soul.

Plato was the first man who perceived that
this idea could be made to provide the philos-
opher with a vehicle of expression more

EMERSON

powerful than any other. If a man will once
plant himself firmly on the proposition that
he is the universe, that every emotion or
expression of his mind is correlated in some
way to phenomena in the external world, and
that he shall say how correlated, he is in a
position where the power of speech is at a
maximum. His figures of speech, his tropes,
his witticisms, take rank with the law of grav-
ity and the precession of the equinoxes.
Philosophical exaltation of the individual can-
not go beyond this point. It is the climax.

This is the school of thought to which
Emerson belonged. The sun and moon, the
planets, are mere symbols. They signify
whatever the poet chooses. The planets for
the most part stay in conjunction just long
enough to flash his thought through their
symbolism, and no permanent relation is
established between the soul and the zodiac.
There is, however, one link of correlation be-
tween the external and internal worlds which
Emerson considered established, and in which
he believed almost literally, namely, the moral
law. This idea he drew from Kant through
Coleridge and Wordsworth, and it is so famil-
iar to us all that it hardly needs stating. The
fancy that the good, the true, the beautiful, —
all things of which we instinctively approve,
13

EMERSON

— are somehow connected together and are
really one thing; that our appreciation of
them is in its essence the recognition of a
law ; that this law, in fact all law and the very
idea of law, is a mere subjective experience ;
and that hence any external sequence which
we coordinate and name, like the law of grav-
ity, is really intimately connected with our
moral nature, — this fancy has probably some
basis of truth. Emerson adopted it as a
corner-stone of his thought.

Such are the ideas at the basis of Emerson's
philosophy, and it is fair to speak of them in
this place because they antedate everything
else which we know of him. They had been
for years in his mind before he spoke at all.
It was in the armor of this invulnerable ideal-
ism and with weapons like shafts of light that
he came forth to fight.

In 1836, at the age of thirty-three, Emerson
published the little pamphlet called Nature,
which was an attempt to state his creed. Al-
though still young, he was not without ex-
perience of life. He had been assistant
minister to the Rev. Dr. Ware from 1829
to 1832, when he resigned his ministry on
account of his views regarding the Lord's
Supper. He had married and lost his first
wife in the same interval. He had been
14

EMERSON

abroad and had visited Carlyle in 1833. He
had returned and settled in Concord, and had
taken up the profession of lecturing, upon
which he in part supported himself ever after.
It is unnecessary to review these early lec-
tures. " Large portions of them," says Mr.
Cabot, his biographer, "appeared afterwards in
the Essays, especially those of the first series."
Suffice it that through them Emerson had
become so well known that although Nature
was published anonymously, he was recog-
nized as the author. Many people had heard
of him at the time he resigned his charge,
and the story went abroad that the young
minister of the Second Church had gone
mad. The lectures had not discredited the
story, and Nature seemed to corroborate it.
Such was the impression which the book
made upon Boston in 1836. As we read it
to-day, we are struck by its extraordinary
beauty of language. It is a supersensuous,
lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evi-
dently by a man of genius. It reveals a
nature compelling respect, — a Shelley, and
yet a sort of Yankee Shelley, who is mad only
when the wind is nor'-nor'west ; a mature
nature which must have been nourished for
years upon its own thoughts, to speak this
new language so eloquently, to stand so
15

EMERSON

calmly on its feet. The deliverance of his
thought is so perfect that this work adapts
itself to our mood and has the quality of
poetry. This fluency Emerson soon lost; it
is the quality missing in his poetry. It is the
efflorescence of youth.

" In good health, the air is a cordial of
incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common,
in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded
sky, without having in my thoughts any occur-
rence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed
a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink
of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off
his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
period soever of life is always a child. In
the woods is perpetual youth. Within these
plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity
reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the
guest sees not how he should tire of them in
a thousand years. ... It is the uniform
effect of culture on the human mind, not to
shake our faith in the stability of particular
phenomena, as heat, water, azote; but to
lead us to regard nature as phenomenon,
not a substance ; to attribute necessary exist-
ence to spirit ; to esteem nature as an accident
and an effect."

Perhaps these quotations from the pam-
phlet called Nature are enough to show the
16

EMERSON

clouds of speculation in which Emerson had
been walking. With what lightning they
were charged was soon seen.

In 1837 ne was asked to deliver the Phi
Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was
the opportunity for which he had been wait-
ing. The mystic and eccentric young poet-
preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns
out to be a man exclusively interested in real
life. This recluse, too tender for contact with
the rough facts of the world, whose con-
science has retired him to rural Concord,
pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts
forth the paw of a full-grown lion.

Emerson has left behind him nothing
stronger than this address, The American
Scholar. It was the first application of his
views to the events of his day, written and
delivered in the heat of early manhood while
his extraordinary powers were at their height.
It moves with a logical progression of which
he soon lost the habit. The subject of it,
the scholar's relation to the world, was the
passion of his life. The body of his belief is
to be found in this address, and in any ade-
quate account of him the whole address ought
to be given.

" Thus far," he said, " our holiday has been
simply a friendly sign of the survival of the

EMERSON

love of letters amongst a people too busy to
give to letters any more. As such it is pre-
cious as the sign of an indestructible instinct.
Perhaps the time is already come when it
ought to be, and will be, something else;
when the sluggard intellect of this continent
will look from under its iron lids and fill the
postponed expectation of the world with some-
thing better than the exertions of mechanical
skill. . . . The theory of books is noble.
The scholar of the first age received into him
the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it
the new arrangement of his own mind, and
uttered it again. It came into him life; it
went out from him truth. . . . Yet hence
arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which
attaches to the act of creation, the act of
thought, is transferred to the record. The
poet chanting was felt to be a divine man:
henceforth the chant is divine, also. The
writer was a just and wise spirit: hence-
forward it is settled the book is perfect ; as
love of the hero corrupts into worship of his
statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious :
the guide is a tyrant. . . . Books are the
best of things, well used ; abused, among
the worst. What is the right use? What
is the one end which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire. . . .
18

EMERSON

The one thing in the world, of value, is the act-
ive soul. This every man is entitled to ; this
every man contains within him, although in
almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn.
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters
truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ;
not the privilege of here and there a favor-
ite, but the sound estate of every man. . . .
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of
genius by over-influence. The literature of
every nation bears me witness. The English
dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for
two hundred years. . . . These being his
functions, it becomes him to feel all con-
fidence in himself, and to defer never to the
popular cry. He, and he only, knows the
world. The world of any moment is the
merest appearance. Some great decorum,
some fetish of a government, some ephem-
eral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by
half mankind and cried down by the other
half, as if all depended on this particular
up or down. The odds are that the whole
question is not worth the poorest thought
which the scholar has lost in listening to the
controversy, Let him not quit his belief that
a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be
the crack of doom."

EMERSON

Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's
our " intellectual Declaration of Independ-
ence," and indeed it was. " The Phi Beta
Kappa speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an
event without any former parallel in our liter-
ary annals, — a scene always to be treasured
in the memory for its picturesqueness and
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless
aisles, what windows clustering with eager
heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what
grim silence of foregone dissent ! "

The authorities of the Divinity School can
hardly have been very careful readers of
Nature and The American Scholar, or they
would not have invited Emerson, in 1838, to
deliver the address to the graduating class.
This was Emerson's second opportunity to
apply his beliefs directly to society. A few
lines out of the famous address are enough
to show that he saw in the church of his day
signs of the same decadence that he saw in
the letters : " The prayers and even the dog-
mas of our church are like the zodiac of
Denderah and the astronomical monuments
of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from any-
thing now extant in the life and business of
the people. They mark the height to which
the waters once rose. ... It is the office of
a true teacher to show us that God is, not
20

EMERSON

was ; that he speaketh, not spake. The true
Christianity — a faith like Christ's in the in-
finitude of man — is lost. None believeth in
the soul of man, but only in some man or
person old and departed. Ah me ! no man
goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this
saint or that poet, avoiding the God who
seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret;
they love to be blind in public. They think
society wiser than their soul, and know not
that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than
the whole world."

It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty
utterances of these early addresses as attacks
upon society, but their reception explains
them. The element of absolute courage is
the same in all natures. Emerson himself
was not unconscious of what function he was
performing.

The " storm in our wash-bowl " which fol-
lowed this Divinity School address, the letters
of remonstrance from friends, the advertise-
ments by the Divinity School of " no com-
plicity," must have been cheering to Emerson.
His unseen yet dominating ambition is shown
throughout the address, and in this note in
his diary of the following year : —

"August 31. Yesterday at the Phi Beta
Kappa anniversary. Steady, steady. I am
21

EMERSON

convinced that if a man will be a true scholar
he shall have perfect freedom. The young
people and the mature hint at odium and the
aversion of forces to be presently encountered
in society. I say No ; I fear it not."

The lectures and addresses which form the
latter half of the first volume in the collected
edition show the early Emerson in the ripe-
ness of his powers. These writings have a
lyrical sweep and a beauty which the later
works often lack. Passages in them remind
us of Hamlet: —

" How silent, how spacious, what room for
all, yet without space to insert an atom ; —
in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in
balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes
forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a
strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and
boundless. It will not be dissected, nor un-
ravelled, nor shown. . . . The great Pan of
old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to
signify the beautiful variety of things and the
firmament, his coat of stars, — was but the
representative of thee, O rich and various
man ! thou palace of sight and sound, carry-
ing in thy senses the morning and the night
and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain,
the geometry of the City of God; in thy
heart, the bower of love and the realms of

EMERSON

right and wrong. . . . Every star in heaven
is discontent and insatiable. Gravitation and
chemistry cannot content them. Ever they
woo and court the eye of the beholder.
Every man who comes into the world they
seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his
mind, for they desire to republish themselves
in a more delicate world than that they oc-
cupy. . . . So it is with all immaterial objects.
These beautiful basilisks set their brute glori-
ous eyes on the eye of every child, and, if
they can, cause their nature to pass through
his wondering eyes into him, and so all things
are mixed."

Emerson is never far from his main
thought: —

" The universe does not attract us till it is
housed in an individual." " A man, a personal
ascendency, is the only great phenomenon."

" I cannot find language of sufficient energy
to convey my sense of the sacredness of
private integrity."

On the other hand, he is never far from his
great fear : " But Truth is such a fly-away,
such a sly-boots, so untransportable and un-
barrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to
catch as light." " Let him beware of propos-
ing to himself any end. ... I say to you
plainly, there is no end so sacred or so large
23

EMERSON

that if pursued for itself will not become car-
rion and an offence to the nostril."

There can be nothing finer than Emerson's
knowledge of the world, his sympathy with
young men and with the practical difficulties
of applying his teachings. We can see in his
early lectures before students and mechanics
how much he had learned about the structure
of society from his own short contact with the
organized church.

" Each finds a tender and very intelligent
conscience a disqualification for success.
Each requires of the practitioner a certain
shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness
and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a
sequestration from the sentiments of generos-
ity and love, a compromise of private opinion
and lofty integrity. . . . The fact that a new
thought and hope have dawned in your breast,
should apprise you that in the same hour a
new light broke in upon a thousand private
hearts. . . . And further I will not dissemble
my hope that each person whom I address has
felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs,
timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place
a free and helpful man, a reformer, a bene-
factor, not content to slip along through the
world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his
nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as
24

EMERSON

he can, but a brave and upright man who
must find or cut a straight road to every-
thing excellent in the earth, and not only
go honorably himself, but make it easier for
all who follow him to go in honor and with
benefit. . . ."

Beneath all lay a greater matter, — Emer-
son's grasp of the forms and conditions of
progress, his reach of intellect, which could
afford fair play to every one.

His lecture on The Conservative is not a
puzzling jeu d' esprit, like Bishop Blougram's
Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the
opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform
so as to represent real life. Hardly can such
a brilliant statement of the case be found else-
where in literature. It is not necessary to
quote here the reformer's side of the question,
for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it.
The conservatives' attitude he gives with such
accuracy and such justice that the very bank-
ers of State Street seem to be speaking : —

" The order of things is as good as the
character of the population permits. Con-
sider it as the work of a great and beneficent
and progressive necessity, which, from the
first pulsation in the first animal life up to the
present high culture of the best nations, has
advanced thus far. . . .
25

EMERSON

" The conservative party in the universe
concedes that the radical would talk suffi-
ciently to the purpose if we were still in the
garden of Eden ; he legislates for man as he
ought to be; his theory is right, but he
makes no allowance for friction, and this
omission makes his whole doctrine false.
The idealist retorts that the conservative falls
into a far more noxious error in the other
extreme. The conservative assumes sickness
as a necessity, and his social frame is a hos-
pital, his total legislation is for the present
distress, a universe in slippers and flannels,
with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and
herb tea. Sickness gets organized as well as
health, the vice as well as the virtue."

It is unnecessary to go, one by one, through
the familiar essays and lectures which Emer-
son published between 1838 and 1875. They
are in everybody's hands and in everybody's
thoughts. In 1840 he wrote in his diary:
" In all my lectures I have taught one doc-
trine, namely, the infinitude of the private
man, This the people accept readily enough,
and even with commendation, as long as I
call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature
or the Household ; but the moment I call it
Religion they are shocked, though it be only
the application of the same truth which they
26

EMERSON

receive elsewhere to a new class of facts."
To the platform he returned, and left it only
once or twice during the remainder of his
life.

His writings vary in coherence. In his
early occasional pieces, like the Phi Beta
Kappa address, coherence is at a maximum.
They were written for a purpose, and were
perhaps struck off all at once. But he earned
his living by lecturing, and a lecturer is
always recasting his work and using it in dif-
ferent forms. A lecturer has no prejudice
against repetition. It is noticeable that in
some of Emerson's important lectures the
logical scheme is more perfect than in his
essays. The truth seems to be that in the
process of working up and perfecting his
writings, in revising and filing his sentences,
the logical scheme became more and more
obliterated. Another circumstance helped
make his style fragmentary. He was by
nature a man of inspirations and exalted
moods. He was subject to ecstasies, during
which his mind worked with phenomenal
brilliancy. Throughout his works and in his
diary we find constant reference to these
moods, and to his own inability to control or
recover them. "But what we want is con-
secutiveness. 'T is with us a flash of light,
27

EMERSON

then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah !
could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an
astronomy of Copernican worlds ! "

In order to take advantage of these periods
of divination, he used to write down the
thoughts that came to him at such times.
From boyhood onward he kept journals and
commonplace books, and in the course of his
reading and meditation he collected innumer-
able notes and quotations which he indexed
for ready use. In these mines he " quarried,"
as Mr. Cabot says, for his lectures and essays.
When he needed a lecture he went to the
repository, threw together what seemed to
have a bearing on some subject, and gave it a
title. If any other man should adopt this
method of composition, the result would be in-
comprehensible chaos; because most men
have many interests, many moods, many and
conflicting ideas. But with Emerson it was
otherwise. There was only one thought
which could set him aflame, and that was the
thought of the unfathomed might of man.
This thought was his religion, his politics, his
ethics, his philosophy. One moment of in-
spiration was in him own brother to the next
moment of inspiration, although they might
be separated by six weeks. When he came
to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted
28

EMERSON

well, no matter in what order he placed them,
because they were all part of the same idea.

His works are all one single attack on the
vice of the age, moral cowardice. He assails
it not by railings and scorn, but by positive
and stimulating suggestion. The imagination
of the reader is touched by every device which
can awake the admiration for heroism, the
consciousness of moral courage. Wit, quo-
tation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhet-
oric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation,
are launched at the reader, till he feels little
lambent flames beginning to kindle in him.
He is perhaps unable to see the exact logical
connection between two paragraphs of an
essay, yet he feels they are germane. He
takes up Emerson tired and apathetic, but
presently he feels himself growing heady and
truculent, strengthened in his most inward
vitality, surprised to find himself again master
in his own house.

The difference between Emerson and the
other moralists is that all these stimulating
pictures and suggestions are not given by him
in illustration of a general proposition. They
have never been through the mill of general-
ization in his own mind. He himself could
not have told you their logical bearing on
one another. They have all the vividness of
29

EMERSON

disconnected fragments of life, and yet they
all throw light on one another, like the facets
of a jewel. But whatever cause it was that
led him to adopt his method of writing, it is
certain that he succeeded in delivering him-
self of his thought with an initial velocity and
carrying power such as few men ever attained.
He has the force at his command of the
thrower of the discus.

His style is American, and beats with the
pulse of the climate. He is the only writer
we have had who writes as he speaks, who
makes no literary parade, has no pretensions
of any sort. He is the only writer we have
had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to
his temperament. It is impossible to name
his style without naming his character : they
are one thing.

Both in language and in elocution Emerson
was a practised and consummate artist, who
knew how both to command his effects and to
conceal his means. The casual, practical,
disarming directness with which he writes
puts any honest man at his mercy. What
difference does it make whether a man who
can talk like this is following an argument or
not ? You cannot always see Emerson
clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but
you always know exactly on what spot he is
3°

EMERSON

standing. You judge it by the flight of the
objects he throws over the wall, — a bootjack,
an apple, a crown, a razor, a volume of verse.
With one or other of these missiles, all de-
livered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty
sure to hit you. These catchwords stick in
the mind. People are not in general influ-
enced by long books or discourses, but by
odd fragments of observation which they
overhear, sentences or head-lines which they
read while turning over a book at random or
while waiting for dinner to be announced.
These are the oracles and orphic words that
get lodged in the mind and bend a man's
most stubborn will. Emerson called them
the Police of the Universe. His works are a
treasury of such things. They sparkle in the
mine, or you may carry them off in your
pocket. They get driven into your mind like
nails, and on them catch and hang your own
experiences, till what was once his thought
has become your character.

" God offers to every mind its choice be-
tween truth and repose. Take which you
please ; you can never have both." " Dis-
content is want of self-reliance ; it is infirmity
of will." " It is impossible for a man to be
cheated by any one but himself."

The orchestration with which Emerson in-
31

EMERSON

troduces and sustains these notes from the
spheres is as remarkable as the winged things
themselves. Open his works at a hazard.
You hear a man talking.

" A garden is like those pernicious machin-
eries we read of every month in the news-
papers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his
hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his
whole body to irresistible destruction. In an
evil hour he pulled down his wall and added
a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but
land is worse. If a man own land, the land
owns him. Now let him leave home if he
dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of
melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he
has done and all he means to do, stand in his
way like duns, when he would go out of his
gate."

Your attention is arrested by the reality of
this gentleman in his garden, by the first-hand
quality of his mind. It matters not on what
subject he talks. While you are musing,
still pleased and patronizing, he has picked
up the bow of Ulysses, bent it with the
ease of Ulysses, and sent a shaft clear through
the twelve axes, nor missed one of them.
But this, it seems, was mere byplay and
marksmanship ; for before you have done
wondering, Ulysses rises to his feet in anger,
32

EMERSON

and pours flight after flight, arrow after arrow,
from the great bow. The shafts sing and
strike, the suitors fall in heaps. The brow of
Ulysses shines with unearthly splendor. The
air is filled with lightning. After a little,
without shock or transition, without apparent
change of tone, Mr. Emerson is offering you
a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you
mind the last step at the garden end. If the
man who can do these things be not an artist,
then must we have a new vocabulary and re-
name the professions.

There is, in all this effectiveness of Emer-
son, no pose, no literary art; nothing that
corresponds even remotely to the pretended
modesty and ignorance with which Socrates
lays pitfalls for our admiration in Plato's
dialogues.

It was the platform which determined Em-
erson's style. He was not a writer, but a
speaker. On the platform his manner of
speech was a living part of his words. The
pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the
searching, the balancing, the turning forward
and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then
the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of
lightning which you saw before your eyes de-
scend into a man of genius, — all this was
Emerson. He invented this style of speak-
3 33

EMERSON

ing, and made it express the supersensuous,
the incommunicable. Lowell wrote, while
still under the spell of the magician : " Em-
erson's oration was more disjointed than
usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and
ended everywhere, and yet, as always with
that divine man, it left you feeling that some-
thing beautiful had passed that way, some-
thing more beautiful than anything else, like
the rising and setting of stars. Every pos-
sible criticism might have been made on it
but one, — that it was not noble. There was
a tone in it that awakened all elevating asso-
ciations. He boggled, he lost his place, he
had to put on his glasses ; but it was as if a
creature from some fairer world had lost his
way in our fogs, and it was our fault, not his.
It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as
stars are made of, and you could n't help feel-
ing that, if you waited awhile, all that was
nebulous would be whirled into planets, and
would assume the mathematical gravity of
system. All through it I felt something in
me that cried, ' Ha ! ha ! ' to the sound of the
trumpets."

It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair
to be overcome with the sense of the immedi-
acy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the
victory of good over evil, the value, now
34

EMERSON

and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor.
Such moments come to us all. But for a man
to sit in his chair and write what shall call up
these forces in the bosoms of others — that is
desert, that is greatness. To do this was the
gift of Emerson. The whole earth is enriched
by every moment of converse with him. The
shows and shams of life become transparent,
the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shut-
ters of the spirit are opened, and provinces
and realms of our own existence lie gleaming
before us.

It has been necessary to reduce the living
soul of Emerson to mere dead attributes like
" moral courage " in order that we might talk
about him at all. - His effectiveness comes
from his character ; not from his philosophy,
nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from
any of the accidents of his education. He
might never have heard of Berkeley or Plato.
A slightly different education might have led
him to throw his teaching into the form of
historical essays or of stump speeches. He
might, perhaps, have been bred a stone-
mason, and have done his work in the world
by travelling with a panorama. But he would
always have been Emerson. His weight and
his power would always have been the
same. It is solely as character that he
35

EMERSON

is important. He discovered nothing; he
bears no relation whatever to the history of
philosophy. We must regard him and deal
with him simply as a man.

Strangely enough, the world has always
insisted upon accepting him as a thinker:
and hence a great coil of misunderstanding.
As a thinker, Emerson is difficult to classify.
Before you begin to assign him a place, you
must clear the ground by a disquisition as to
what is meant by " a thinker," and how
Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a
man, Emerson is as plain as Ben Franklin.

People have accused him of inconsistency;
they say that he teaches one thing one day,
and another the next day. But from the point
of view of Emerson there is no such thing as
inconsistency. Every man is each day a new
man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day.
It is immaterial and waste of time to consider
what he once was or what he may be.

His picturesque speech delights in fact and
anecdote, and a public which is used to treat-
ises and deduction cares always to be told
the moral. It wants everything reduced to
a generalization. All generalizations are
partial truths, but we are used to them, and
we ourselves mentally make the proper allow-
ance. Emerson's method is, not to give a

EMERSON

generalization and trust to our making the
allowance, but to give two conflicting state-
ments and leave the balance of truth to be
struck in our own minds on the facts. There
is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and
very legitimate method of procedure. But
he is much more than a theorist: he is a
practitioner. He does not merely state a
theory of agitation : he proceeds to agitate.
" Do not," he says, " set the least value on
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do
not, as if I pretended to settle anything as
false or true. I unsettle all things. No facts
are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply
experiment, an endless seeker with no past at
my back." He was not engaged in teaching
many things, but one thing, — Courage.
Sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great
characters, — Fox, Milton, Alcibiades ; some-
times he inspires it by bidding us beware of
imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his
rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hin-
drances and dangers to our development.
There is no inconsistency here. Emerson
might logically have gone one step further and
raised inconsistency into a jewel. For what
is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a
timid and conservative man, as to do some-
thing inconsistent and regrettable? It lends
37

EMERSON

character to him at once. He breathes freer
and is stronger for the experience.

Emerson is no cosmopolitan. He is a
patriot. He is not like Goethe, whose sym-
pathies did not run on national lines. Emer-
son has America in his mind's eye all the
time. There is to be a new religion, and it is
to come from America ; a new and better type
of man, and he is to be an American. He
not only cared little or nothing for Europe,
but he cared not much for the world at large.
His thought was for the future of this country.
You cannot get into any chamber in his mind
which is below this chamber of patriotism.
He loves the valor of Alexander and the
grace of the Oxford athlete; but he loves
them not for themselves. He has a use for
them. They are grist to his mill and powder
to his gun. His admiration of them he sub-
ordinates to his main purpose, — they are his
blackboard and diagrams. His patriotism is
the backbone of his significance. He came to
his countrymen at a time when they lacked,
not thoughts, but manliness. The needs of
his own particular public are always before
him.

" It is odd that our people should have, not
water on the brain, but a little gas there. A
shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that
38

EMERSON

1 whatever they say has a little the air of a
speech.' "

" I shall not need to go into an enumera-
tion of our national defects and vices which
require this Order of Censors in the State. . . .
The timidity of our public opinion is our dis-
ease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion,
the absence of private opinion."

" Our measure of success is the moderation
and low level of an individual's judgment.
Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such
weight in Boston that the popular idea of
religion was whatever this eminent divine
held."

" Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity, the squalid contentment of the
times."

The politicians he scores constantly.

" Who that sees the meanness of our politics
but congratulates Washington that he is
long already wrapped in his shroud and forever
safe." The following is his description of the
social world of his day : " If any man consider
the present aspects of what is called by dis-
tinction society, he will see the need of these
ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to
be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
desponding whimperers."

It is the same wherever we open his books.

EMERSON

He must spur on, feed up, bring forward the
dormant character of his countrymen. When
he goes to England, he sees in English life
nothing except those elements which are de-
ficient in American life. If you wish a cata-
logue of what America has not, read English
Traits. Emerson's patriotism had the effect
of expanding his philosophy. To-day we
know the value of physique, for science has
taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his
day, and his philosophy affords no basis for
it. Emerson in this matter transcends his
philosophy. When in England, he was
fairly made drunk with the physical life he
found there. He is like Caspar Hauser gaz-
ing for the first time on green fields. English
Traits is the ruddiest book he ever wrote. It
is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical
well-being, and ends with the dominant note
of his belief: " By this general activity and by
this sacredness of individuals, they [the Eng-
lish] have in seven hundred years evolved the
principles of freedom. It is the land of
patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the
ocean out of which it emerged should wash
it away, it will be remembered as an island
famous for immortal laws, for the announce-
ments of original right which make the stone
tables of liberty." He had found in England
40

EMERSON

free speech, personal courage, and reverence
for the individual.

No convulsion could shake Emerson or
make his view unsteady even for an instant.
What no one else saw, he saw, and he saw
nothing else. Not a boy in the land wel-
comed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as
did this shy village philosopher, then at the
age of fifty-eight. He saw that war was the
cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical.
It was not the cause of the slave that moved
him ; it was not the cause of the Union for
which he cared a farthing. It was something
deeper than either of these things for which
he had been battling all his life. It was the
cause of character against convention. What-
ever else the war might bring, it was sure to
bring in character, to leave behind it a file of
heroes; if not heroes, then villains, but in
any case strong men. On the 9th of April,
1 86 1, three days before Fort Sumter was
bombarded, he had spoken with equanimity
of " the downfall of our character-destroying
civilization. . . . We find that civilization
crowed too soon, that our triumphs were
treacheries ; we had opened the wrong door
and let the enemy into the castle."

" Ah," he said, when the firing began,
" sometimes gunpowder smells good." Soon
41

EMERSON

after the attack on Sumter he said in a public
address, " We have been very homeless for
some years past, say since 1850; but now we
have a country again. . . . The war was an
eye-opener, and showed men of all parties
and opinions the value of those primary
forces that lie beneath all political action."
And it was almost a personal pledge when
he said at the Harvard Commemoration in
1865, "We shall not again disparage Amer-
ica, now that we have seen what men it will
bear."

The place which Emerson forever occupies
as a great critic is defined by the same sharp
outlines that mark his work, in whatever light
and from whatever side we approach it. A
critic in the modern sense he was not, for his
point of view is fixed, and he reviews the
world like a search-light placed on the top of
a tall tower. He lived too early and at too
great a distance from the forum of European
thought to absorb the ideas of evolution and
give place to them in his philosophy. Evolu-
tion does not graft well upon the Platonic
Idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred
sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Em-
erson's indignation more than the attempts of
the medical faculty and of phrenologists to
classify, and therefore limit individuals. " The
42

EMERSON

grossest ignorance does not disgust me like
this ignorant knowingness."

We miss in Emerson the underlying con-
ception of growth, of development, so charac-
teristic of the thought of our own day, and
which, for instance, is found everywhere
latent in Browning's poetry. Browning re-
gards character as the result of experience
and as an ever changing growth. To Emer-
son, character is rather an entity complete
and eternal from the beginning. He is prob-
ably the last great writer to look at life from
a stationary standpoint. There is a certain
lack of the historic sense in all he has written.
The ethical assumption that all men are
exactly alike permeates his work. In his
mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and General
Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmos-
phere, or rather stand as mere naked charac-
ters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He
is probably the last great writer who will fling
about classic anecdotes as if they were club
gossip. In the discussion of morals, this
assumption does little harm. The stories and
proverbs which illustrate the thought of the
moralist generally concern only those simple
relations of life which are common to all
ages. There is charm in this familiar dealing
with antiquity. The classics are thus domes-
43

EMERSON

ticated and made real to us. What matter if
JEsop appear a little too much like an Ameri-
can citizen, so long as his points tell ?

It is in Emerson's treatment of the fine arts
that we begin to notice his want of historic
sense. Art endeavors to express subtle and
ever changing feelings by means of conven-
tions which are as protean as the forms of a
cloud ; and the man who in speaking on the
plastic arts makes the assumption that all
men are alike will reveal before he has uttered
three sentences that he does not know what
art is, that he has never experienced any form
of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a
time and clime where there was no plastic art,
and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas
about art by means of a highly complex pro-
cess of reasoning. He dwelt constantly in a
spiritual place which was the very focus of
high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm,
this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned
out the probable meaning of the fine arts.
" This," thought Emerson, his eye rolling in
a fine frenzy of moral feeling, " this must be
what Apelles experienced, this fervor is the
passion of Bramante. I understand the Par-
thenon." And so he projected his feelings
about morality into the field of the plastic arts.
He deals very freely and rather indiscrimi-
44

EMERSON

nately with the names of artists, — Phidias,
Raphael, Salvator Rosa, — and he speaks
always in such a way that it is impossible to
connect what he says with any impression we
have ever received from the works of those
masters.

In fact, Emerson has never in his life felt
the normal appeal of any painting, or any
sculpture, or any architecture, or any music.
These things, of which he does not know the
meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses
constantly, as symbols to convey ethical
truths. The result is that his books are full
of blind places, like the notes which will not
strike on a sick piano.

It is interesting to find that the one art of
which Emerson did have a direct understand-
ing, the art of poetry, gave him some insight
into the relation of the artist to his vehicle.
In his essay on Shakespeare there is a full
recognition of the debt of Shakespeare to his
times. This essay is filled with the historic
sense. We ought not to accuse Emerson
because he lacked appreciation of the fine
arts, but rather admire the truly Goethean
spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of
arts of which he had no understanding. This
is the same spirit which led him to insist
on the value of the Eastern poets. Perhaps
45

EMERSON

there exist a few scholars who can tell us how
far Emerson understood or misunderstood
Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we
need not be disturbed for his learning. It is
enough that he makes us recognize that these
men were men too, and that their writings
mean something not unknowable to us. The
East added nothing to Emerson, but gave
him a few trappings of speech. The whole of
his mysticism is to be found in Nature, writ-
ten before he knew the sages of the Orient,
and it is not improbable that there is some
real connection between his own mysticism
and the mysticism of the Eastern poets.

Emerson's criticism on men and books is
like the test of a great chemist who seeks one
or two elements. He burns a bit of the stuff
in his incandescent light, shows the lines of it
in his spectrum, and there an end.

It was a thought of genius that led him
to write Representative Men. The scheme
of this book gave play to every illumination
of his mind, and it pinned him down to the
objective, to the field of vision under his
microscope. The table of contents of Repre-
sentative Men is the dial of his education. It
is as follows : Uses of Great Men ; Plato, or
The Philosopher; Plato, New Readings;
Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne,
46

EMERSON

or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet;
Napoleon, or The Man of the World ; Goethe,
or The Writer. The predominance of the
writers over all other types of men is not cited
to show Emerson's interest in The Writer, for
we know his interest centred in the practical
man, — even his ideal scholar is a practical
man, — but to show the sources of his illus-
tration. Emerson's library was the old-fash-
ioned gentleman's library. His mines of
thought were the world's classics. This is
one reason why he so quickly gained an in-
ternational currency. His very subjects in
Representative Men are of universal interest,
and he is limited only by certain inevitable
local conditions. Representative Men is
thought by many persons to be his best
book. It is certainly filled with the strokes
of a master. There exists no more profound
criticism than Emerson's analysis of Goethe
and of Napoleon, by both of whom he was
at once fascinated and repelled.

EMERSON

The attitude of Emerson's mind toward re-
formers results so logically from his philos-
ophy that it is easily understood. He saw
in them people who sought something as a
panacea or as an end in itself. To speak
strictly and not irreverently, he had his own
panacea, — the development of each individ-
ual; and he was impatient of any other.
He did not believe in association. The very
idea of it involved a surrender by the individ-
ual of some portion of his identity, and of
course all the reformers worked through their
associations. With their general aims he
sympathized. " These reforms," he wrote,
" are our contemporaries ; they are ourselves,
our own light and sight and conscience ; they
only name the relation which subsists between
us and the vicious institutions which they go
to rectify." But with the methods of the re-
formers he had no sympathy : " He who aims
at progress should aim at an infinite, not at
a special benefit. The reforms whose fame
now fills the land with temperance, anti-
slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal
48

EMERSON

labor, fair and generous as each appears, are
poor bitter things when prosecuted for them-
selves as an end." Again: " The young men
who have been vexing society for these last
years with regenerative methods seem to have
made this mistake : they all exaggerated some
special means, and all failed to see that the
reform of reforms must be accomplished
without means."

Emerson did not at first discriminate be-
tween the movement of the Abolitionists and
the hundred and one other reform movements
of the period ; and in this lack of discrimi-
nation lies a point of extraordinary interest.
The Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out,
had in fact got hold of the issue which was to
control the fortunes of the republic for thirty
years. The difference between them and the
other reformers was this : that the Abolition-
ists were men set in motion by the primary
and unreasoning passion of pity. Theory
played small part in the movement. It grew
by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty
will arouse in the minds of sensitive people.

It is not to be denied that the social con-
ditions in Boston in 1831 foreboded an
outbreak in some form. If the abolition
excitement had not drafted off the rising
forces, there might have been a Merry Mount,
4 49

■■/

EMERSON

an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of
some sort. The abolition movement afforded
the purest form of an indulgence in human
feeling that was ever offered to men. It was
intoxicating. It made the agitators perfectly
happy. They sang at their work and bubbled
over with exhilaration. They were the only
people in the United States, at this time, who
were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical
activity.

But Emerson at first lacked the touchstone,
whether of intellect or of heart, to see the
difference between this particular movement
and the other movements then in progress.
Indeed, in so far as he sees any difference
between the Abolitionists and the rest, it is
that the Abolitionists were more objectionable
and distasteful to him. " Those,'' he said,
" who are urging with most ardor what are
called the greatest benefits to mankind are
narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and
affect us as the insane do." And again : " By
the side of these men [the idealists] the hot
agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous
air ; they even look smaller than others. Of
the two, I own I like the speculators the best.
They have some piety which looks with faith
to a fair future unprofaned by rash and un-
equal attempts to realize it." He was drawn
5o

EMERSON

into the abolition cause by having the truth
brought home to him that these people were
fighting for the Moral Law. He was slow in
seeing this, because in their methods they
represented everything he most condemned.
As soon, however, as he was convinced, he
was ready to lecture for them and to give
them the weight of his approval. In 1844
he was already practically an Abolitionist,
and his feelings upon the matter deepened
steadily in intensity ever after.

The most interesting page of Emerson's
published journal is the following, written at
some time previous to 1844; the exact date
is not given. A like page, whether written
or unwritten, may be read into the private
annals of every man who lived before the
war. Emerson has, with unconscious mas-
tery, photographed the half-spectre that
stalked in the minds of all. He wrote : " I
had occasion to say the other day to Eliza-
beth Hoar that I like best the strong and
worthy persons, like her father, who support
the social order without hesitation or misgiv-
ing. I like these; they never incommode
us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of
any sort. But the professed philanthropists,
it is strange and horrible to say, are an alto-
gether odious set of people, whom one would
51

EMERSON

shun as the worst of bores and canters. But
my conscience, my unhappy conscience re-
spects that hapless class who see the faults
and stains of our social order, and who pray
and strive incessantly to right the wrong ; this
annoying class of men and women, though
they commonly find the work altogether be-
yond their faculty, and their results are, for
the present, distressing. They are partial,
and apt to magnify their own. Yes, and the
prostrate penitent, also, — he is not compre-
hensive, he is not philosophical in those tears
and groans. Yet I feel that under him and
his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth
and the sea and all that in them is, and the
axis around which the universe revolves
passes through his body where he stands."

It was the defection of Daniel Webster that
completed the conversion of Emerson and
turned him from an adherent into a propa-
gandist of abolition. Not pity for the slave,
but indignation at the violation of the Moral
Law by Daniel Webster, was at the bottom
of Emerson's anger. His abolitionism was
secondary to his main mission, his main en-
thusiasm. It is for this reason that he stands
on a plane of intellect where he might, under
other circumstances, have met and defeated
Webster. After the 7th of March, 1850, he
52

EMERSON

recognized in Webster the embodiment of all
that he hated. In his attacks on Webster,
Emerson trembles to his inmost fibre with
antagonism. He is savage, destructive,
personal, bent on death.

This exhibition of Emerson as a fighting
animal is magnificent, and explains his life.
There is no other instance of his ferocity.
No other nature but Webster's ever so moved
him; but it was time to be moved, and
Webster was a man of his size. Had these
two great men of New England been matched
in training as they were matched in en-
dowment, and had they then faced each
other in debate, they would not have been
found to differ so greatly in power. Their
natures were electrically repellent, but from
which did the greater force radiate? Their
education differed so radically that it is im-
possible to compare them, but if you trans-
late the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics,
you have something stronger than Webster,
— something that recalls Chatham ; and
Emerson would have had this advantage, —
that he was not afraid. As it was, he left his
library and took the stump. Mr. Cabot has
given us extracts from his speeches : —

" The tameness is indeed complete ; all are
involved in one hot haste of terror, — presi-
53

EMERSON

dents of colleges and professors, saints and
brokers, lawyers and manufacturers ; not a
liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch
of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on
their passive obedience. . . . Mr. Webster,
perhaps, is only following the laws of his
blood and constitution. I suppose his
pledges were not quite natural to him. He
is a man who lives by his memory; a man
of the past, not a man of faith and of hope.
All the drops of his blood have eyes that
look downward, and his finely developed
understanding only works truly and with all
its force when it stands for animal good ; that
is, for property. He looks at the Union as
an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the
completeness of his defence of it so far.
What he finds already written he will defend.
Lucky that so much had got well written
when he came, for he has no faith in the
power of self-government. Not the smallest
municipal provision, if it were new, would
receive his sanction. In Massachusetts, in
1776, he would, beyond all question, have
been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jef-
ferson, but it is a past Adams and Jefferson.
A present Adams or Jefferson he would de-
nounce. . . . But one thing appears certain
to me : that the Union is at an end as soon as
54

EMERSON

an immoral law is enacted. He who writes a
crime into the statute book digs under the
foundations of the Capitol. . . . The words
of John Randolph, wiser than he knew, have
been ringing ominously in all echoes for
thirty years : ' We do not govern the people
of the North by our black slaves, but by their
own white slaves.' . . . They come down
now like the cry of fate, in the moment when
they are fulfilled."

The exasperation of Emerson did not sub-
side, but went on increasing during the next
four years, and on March 7, 1854, he read his
lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law at the New
York Tabernacle : " I have lived all my life
without suffering any inconvenience from
American Slavery. I never saw it ; I never
heard the whip ; I never felt the check on my
free speech and action, until the other day,
when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence,
brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the coun-
try. I say Mr. Webster, for though the bill
was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the
life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had.
It cost him his life, and under the shadow of
his great name inferior men sheltered them-
selves, threw their ballots for it, and made
the law. . . . Nobody doubts that Daniel
Webster could make a good speech. No-
55

EMERSON

body doubts that there were good and plau-
sible things to be said on the part of the
South. But this is not a question of ingenu-
ity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides.
How came he there? . . . But the question
which history will ask is broader. In the
final hour when he was forced by the per-
emptory necessity of the closing armies to
take a side, — did he take the part of great
principles, the side of humanity and justice,
or the side of abuse, and oppression and
chaos? . . . He did as immoral men usually
do, — made very low bows to the Christian
Church and went through all the Sunday
decorums, but when allusion was made to the
question of duty and the sanctions of moral-
ity, he very frankly said, at Albany, ' Some
higher law, something existing somewhere be-
tween here and the heaven — I do not know-
where.' And if the reporters say true, this
wretched atheism found some laughter in the
company."

It was too late for Emerson to shine as a
political debater. On May 14, 1857, Longfel-
low wrote in his diary, " It is rather painful to
see Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and
hooted at by young law students." Emerson
records a similar experience at a later date :
" If I were dumb, yet would I have gone and
56

EMERSON

mowed and muttered or made signs. The
mob roared whenever I attempted to speak,
and after several beginnings I withdrew."
There is nothing " painful " here : it is the
sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage
to circumstance.

The thing to be noted is that this is the
same man, in the same state of excitement
about the same idea, who years before spoke
out in The American Scholar, in the Essays,
and in the Lectures.

What was it that had aroused in Emerson
such Promethean antagonism in 1837 but
those same forces which in 1850 came to
their culmination and assumed visible shape
in the person of Daniel Webster? The formal
victory of Webster drew Emerson into the
arena, and made a dramatic episode in his
life. But his battle with those forces had
begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw
down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta
Kappa oration. Emerson by his writings did
more than any other man to rescue the youth
of the next generation and fit them for the
fierce times to follow. It will not be denied
that he sent ten thousand sons to the war.

In speaking of Emerson's attitude toward
the anti-slavery cause, it has been possible to
dispense with any survey of that movement,
57

EMERSON

because the movement was simple and speci-
fic and is well remembered. But when we
come to analyze the relations he bore to some
of the local agitations of his day, it becomes
necessary to weave in with the matter a dis-
cussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded
in the life of his times, and of which he him-
self was in a sense an outcome. In speaking
of the Transcendentalists, who were essentially
the children of the Puritans, we must begin with
some study of the chief traits of Puritanism.

What parts the factors of climate, circum-
stance, and religion have respectively played
in the development of the New England char-
acter no analysis can determine. We may
trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed
in the lines of the face. We may sometimes
follow from generation to generation the
course of a truth which at first sustained the
spirit of man, till we see it petrify into a
dogma which now kills the spirits of men.
Conscience may destroy the character. The
tragedy of the New England judge enforcing
the Fugitive Slave Law was no new spectacle
in New England. A dogmatic crucifixion of
the natural instincts had been in progress
there for two hundred years. Emerson, who
is more free from dogma than any other
teacher that can be named, yet comes very

EMERSON

near being dogmatic in his reiteration of the
Moral Law.

Whatever volume of Emerson we take up,
the Moral Law holds the same place in his
thoughts. It is the one statable revelation of
truth which he is ready to stake his all upon.
" The illusion that strikes me as the master-
piece in that ring of illusions which our life is,
is the timidity with which we assert our moral
sentiment. We are made of it, the world is
built by it, things endure as they share it ; all
beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it;
yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves
by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him
or them who deny it. Cities go against it, the
college goes against it, the courts snatch any
precedent at any vicious form of law to rule
it out; legislatures listen with appetite to
declamations against it and vote it down."

With this very beautiful and striking pas-
sage no one will quarrel, nor will any one
misunderstand it.

The following passage has the same sort
of poetical truth. " Things are saturated
with the moral law. There is no escape from
it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and
snow, wind and tides, every change, every
cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised
missionary." . . .

EMERSON

But Emerson is not satisfied with metaphor.
" We affirm that in all men is this majestic
perception and command ; that it is the pres-
ence of the eternal in each perishing man ; that
it distances and degrades all statements of
whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and
confused stammerings before its silent revela-
tion. They report the truth. It is the truth."
In this last extract we have Emerson actually
affirming that his dogma of the Moral Law
is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not merely
a form of truth, like the old theologies, but
very distinguishable from all other forms in
the past.

Curiously enough, his statement of the law
grows dogmatic and incisive in proportion as
he approaches the borderland between his
law and the natural instincts : " The last rev-
elation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a
manner it severs the man from all other men ;
makes known to him that the spiritual powers
are sufficient to hhn if no other being existed ;
that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as
if he alone were a system and a state, and
though all should perish could make all
anew." Here we have the dogma applied,
and we see in it only a new form of old Cal-
vinism as cruel as Calvinism, and not much
different from its original. The italics are not
60

EMERSON

Emerson's, but are inserted to bring out an
idea which is everywhere prevalent in his
teaching.

In this final form, the Moral Law, by insist-
ing that sheer conscience can slake the thirst
that rises in the soul, is convicted of false-
hood; and this heartless falsehood is the
same falsehood that has been put into the
porridge of every Puritan child for six genera-
tions. A grown man can digest doctrine and
sleep at night. But a young person of high
purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie
as this half-truth and feeds on it as on the
bread of life, will suffer. It will injure the
action of his heart. Truly the fathers have
eaten sour grapes, therefore the children's
teeth are set on edge.

To understand the civilization of cities, we
must look at the rural population from which
they draw their life. We have recently had
our attention called to the last remnants of
that village life so reverently gathered up by
Miss Wilkins, and of which Miss Emily Dick-
inson was the last authentic voice. The spirit
of this age has examined with an almost patho-
logical interest this rescued society. We must
go to it if we would understand Emerson, who
is the blossoming of its culture. We must
61

EMERSON

study it if we would arrive at any intelligent
and general view of that miscellaneous crop
of individuals who have been called the Tran-
scendentalists.

Between 1830 and 1840 there were already
signs in New England that the nutritive and
reproductive forces of society were not quite
wholesome, not exactly well adjusted. Self-
repression was the religion which had been
inherited. " Distrust Nature " was the motto
written upon the front of the temple. What
would have happened to that society if left to
itself for another hundred years no man can
guess. It was rescued by the two great re-
generators of mankind, new land and war.
The dispersion came, as Emerson said of the
barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too
soon. It happened that the country at large
stood in need of New England as much as
New England stood in need of the country.
This congested virtue, in order to be saved,
must be scattered. This ferment, in order to
be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven
to leaven the whole lump. "As you know,"
says Emerson in his Eulogy on Boston,
"New England supplies annually a large de-
tachment of preachers and schoolmasters and
private tutors to the interior of the South and
West. . . . We are willing to see our sons
62

EMERSON

emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That
is what they were made to do, and what the
land wants and invites."

For purposes of yeast, there was never such
leaven as the Puritan stock. How little the
natural force of the race had really abated
became apparent when it was placed under
healthy conditions, given land to till, foes to
fight, the chance to renew its youth like the
eagle. But during this period the relief had
not yet come. The terrible pressure of Puri-
tanism and conservatism in New England
was causing a revolt not only of the Aboli-
tionists, but of another class of people of a
type not so virile as they. The times have
been smartly described by Lowell in his essay
on Thoreau : —

" Every possible form of intellectual and
physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel.
Bran had its prophets. . . . Everybody had
a Mission (with a capital M) to attend to
everybody else's business. No brain but had
its private maggot, which must have found
pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a
few impecunious zealots abjured the use of
money (unless earned by other people), pro-
fessing to live on the internal revenues of the
spirit. Some had an assurance of instant
millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should

EMERSON

be substituted for buttons. Communities
were established where everything was to be
common but common sense. . . . Conven-
tions were held for every hitherto inconceiv-
able purpose."

Whatever may be said of the Transcenden-
talists, it must not be forgotten that they
represented an elevation of feeling, which
through them qualified the next generation,
and can be traced in the life of New England
to-day. The strong intrinsic character lodged
in these recusants was later made manifest ;
for many of them became the best citizens of
the commonwealth, — statesmen, merchants,
soldiers, men and women of affairs. They
retained their idealism while becoming prac-
tical men. There is hardly an example of
what we should have thought would be com-
mon in their later lives, namely, a reaction
from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into
cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the
flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled
the Abolitionists in their devotion to an idea ;
but with the Transcendentalists self-culture
and the aesthetic and sentimental education
took the place of more public aims. They
seem also to have been persons of greater
social refinement than the Abolitionists.

The Transcendentalists were sure of only
64

EMERSON

one thing, — that society as constituted was
all wrong. In this their main belief they
were right. They were men and women
whose fundamental need was activity, contact
with real life, and the opportunity for social
expansion ; and they keenly felt the chill and
fictitious character of the reigning conven-
tionalities. The rigidity of behavior which
at this time characterized the Bostonians
seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes
disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There
was great gravity, together with a certain
pomp and dumbness, and these things were
supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and
to give them joy. People are apt to forget
that such masks are never worn with ease.
They result from the application of an inflex-
ible will, and always inflict discomfort. The
Transcendentalists found themselves all but
stifled in a society as artificial in its decorum
as the court of France during the last years
of Louis XIV.

Emerson was in no way responsible for the
movement, although he got the credit of hav-
ing evoked it by his teaching. He was elder
brother to it, and was generated by its pa-
rental forces ; but even if Emerson had never
lived, the Transcendentalists would have ap-
peared. He was their victim rather than their
5 65

EMERSON

cause. He was always tolerant of them and
sometimes amused at them, and disposed to
treat them lightly. It is impossible to analyze
their case with more astuteness than he did
in an editorial letter in The Dial. The letter
is cold, but is a masterpiece of good sense.
He had, he says, received fifteen letters on the
Prospects of Culture. " Excellent reasons
have been shown us why the writers, obviously
persons of sincerity and elegance, should be
dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with
their company. . . . They want a friend to
whom they can speak and from whom they
may hear now and then a reasonable word."
After discussing one or two of their proposals,
— one of which was that the tiresome " uncles
and aunts " of the enthusiasts should be placed
by themselves in one delightful village, the
dough, as Emerson says, be placed in one
pan and the leaven in another, — he con-
tinues : " But it would be unjust not to remind
our younger friends that whilst this aspiration
has always made its mark in the lives of men
of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not
remain a detached object, but is satisfied along
with the satisfaction of other aims." Young
Americans " are educated above the work of
their times and country, and disdain it. Many
of the more acute minds pass into a lofty
66

EMERSON

criticism . . . which only embitters their sen-
sibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of
hostility between them and the citizens at
large. . . . We should not know where to find
in literature any record of so much unbalanced
intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension
without talent, so much power without equal
applicability, as our young men pretend to.
. . . The balance of mind and body will re-
dress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the
real distemper. ... It is certain that specu-
lation is no succedaneum for life." He then
turns to find the cure for these distempers in the
farm lands of Illinois, at that time already be-
ing fenced in " almost like New England itself,"
and closes with a suggestion that so long as
there is a woodpile in the yard, and the
" wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the
emigrant, remain unmitigated," relief might
be found even nearer home.

In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he
says : " . . . But their solitary and fastidious
manners not only withdraw them from the
conversation, but from the labors of the
world : they are not good citizens, not good
members of society; unwillingly they bear
their part of the public and private burdens ;
they do not willingly share in the public
charities, in the public religious rites, in the

EMERSON

enterprises of education, of missions foreign
and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-
trade, or in the temperance society. They
do not even like to vote." A less sympathetic
observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them :
" While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils
sat ' gorgeously dressed,' talking about Mars
and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying
themselves the elect of the earth in intellect
and refinement, the liberties of the republic
were running out as fast as they could go at a
breach which another sort of elect persons
were devoting themselves to repair ; and my
complaint against the ' gorgeous ' pedants
was that they regarded their preservers as
hewers of wood and drawers of water, and
their work as a less vital one than the pedan-
tic orations which were spoiling a set of well-
meaning women in a pitiable way." Harriet
Martineau, whose whole work was practical,
and who wrote her journal in 1855 and
in the light of history, was hardly able to
do justice to these unpractical but sincere
spirits.

Emerson was divided from the Transcen-
dentalists by his common sense. His shrewd
business intellect made short work of their
schemes. Each one of their social projects
contained some covert economic weakness,
68

EMERSON

which always turned out to lie in an attack
upon the integrity of the individual, and which
Emerson of all men could be counted on to
detect. He was divided from them also by
the fact that he was a man of genius, who had
sought out and fought out his means of ex-
pression. He was a great artist, and as such
he was a complete being. No one could give
to him nor take from him. His yearnings
found fruition in expression. He was sure of
his place and of his use in this world. But
the Transcendentalists were neither geniuses
nor artists nor complete beings. Nor had
they found their places or uses as yet. They
were men and women seeking light. They
walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding
none. The Transcendentalists are not col-
lectively important because their Sturm und
Drang was intellectual and bloodless. Though
Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau
condemn, yet from the memorials that sur-
vive, one is more impressed with the suffer-
ings than with the ludicrousness of these
persons. There is something distressing
about their letters, their talk, their memoirs,
their interminable diaries. They worry and
contort and introspect. They rave and
dream. They peep and theorize. They cut
open the bellows of life to see where the wind

EMERSON

comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Em-
erson, and Emerson Margaret Fuller. It is
not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a
nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror,
the agony, the rapture, are all unreal, and
have no vital content, no consequence in the
world outside. It is positively wonderful
that so much excitement and so much suffer-
ing should have left behind nothing in the
field of art which is valuable. All that intel-
ligence could do toward solving problems for
his friends Emerson did. But there are situ-
ations in life in which the intelligence is help-
less, and in which something else, something
perhaps possessed by a ploughboy, is more
divine than Plato.

If it were not pathetic, there would be
something cruel — indeed there is something
cruel — in Emerson's incapacity to deal with
Margaret Fuller. He wrote to her on October
24, 1840: " My dear Margaret, I have your
frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I
think I could wish it unwritten. I ought
never to have suffered you to lead me into
any conversation or writing on our relation, a
topic from which with all persons my Genius
warns me away."

The letter proceeds with unimpeachable
emptiness and integrity in the same strain.
70

EMERSON

In 1841 he writes in his diary: " Strange,
cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation
with Margaret, whom I always admire, most
revere when I nearest see, and sometimes
love; yet whom I freeze and who freezes
me to silence when we promise to come
nearest."

Human sentiment was known to Emerson
mainly in the form of pain. His nature
shunned it ; he cast it off as quickly as pos-
sible. There is a word or two in the essay on
Love which seems to show that the inner and
diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but
not for long, been shot with blood : he recalls
only the pain of it. His relations with Mar-
garet Fuller seem never normal, though they
lasted for years. This brilliant woman was in
distress. She was asking for bread, and he
was giving her a stone, and neither of them
was conscious of what was passing. This is
pitiful. It makes us clutch about us to catch
hold, if we somehow may, of the hand of a
man.

There was manliness in Horace Greeley,
under whom Miss Fuller worked on the New
York Tribune not many years afterward. She
wrote : " Mr. Greeley I like, — nay, more,
love. He is in his habit a plebeian, in his
heart a nobleman. His abilities in his own
7i

EMERSON

way are great. He believes in mine to a sur-
prising degree. We are true friends."

This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's
character can be traced to the philosophy of
his race ; at least it can be followed in that
philosophy. There is an implication of
a fundamental falsehood in every bit of
Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That
falsehood consists in the theory of the self-
sufficiency of each individual, men and women
alike. Margaret Fuller is a good example of
the effect of this philosophy, because her
history afterward showed that she was con-
stituted like other human beings, was depend-
ent upon human relationship, and was not
only a very noble, but also a very womanly
creature. Her marriage, her Italian life, and
her tragic death light up with the splendor of
reality the earlier and unhappy period of her
life. This woman had been driven into her
vagaries by the lack of something which she
did not know existed, and which she sought
blindly in metaphysics. Harriet Martineau
writes of her : " It is the most grievous loss I
have almost ever known in private history, the
deferring of Margaret Fuller's married life so
long. That noble last period of her life is
happily on record as well as the earlier."
The hardy Englishwoman has here laid a kind
72

EMERSON

human hand on the weakness of New England,
and seems to be unconscious that she is
making a revelation as to the whole Tran-
scendental movement. But the point is this :
there was no one within reach of Margaret
Fuller, in her early days, who knew what was
her need. One offered her Kant, one Comte,
one Fourier, one Swedenborg, one the Moral
Law. You cannot feed the heart on these
things.

Yet there is a bright side to this New Eng-
land spirit, which seems, if we look only to
the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and de-
ficient. A bright and cheery courage appears
in certain natures of which the sun has made
conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss,
so splendid is the outcome. The practical,
dominant, insuppressible active temperaments
who have a word for every emergency, and
who carry the controlled force of ten men at
their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit.
Emerson knew not tears, but he and the
hundred other beaming and competent char-
acters which New England has produced
make us almost envy their state. They give
us again the old Stoics at their best.

Very closely connected with this subject —
the crisp and cheery New England tempera-
ment — lies another which any discussion of
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EMERSON

Emerson must bringup, — namely, Asceticism.
It is probable that in dealing with Emerson's
feelings about the plastic arts we have to do
with what is really the inside, or metaphysical
side, of the same phenomena which present
themselves on the outside, or physical side, in
the shape of asceticism.

Emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to
us in almost every form in which history can
record a man. It is in his philosophy, in his
style, in his conduct, and in his appearance.
It was, however, not in his voice. Mr. Cabot,
with that reverence for which every one must
feel personally grateful to him, has preserved
a description of Emerson by the New York
journalist, N. P. Willis : " It is a voice with
shoulders in it, which he has not; with lungs
in it far larger than his; with a walk which
the public never see ; with a fist in it which
his own hand never gave him the model for ;
and with a gentleman in it which his parochial
and ' bare-necessaries-of-life ' sort of exterior
gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine
nothing in nature (which seems too to have a
type for everything) like the want of corre-
spondence between the Emerson that goes in
at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at
the ear. A heavy and vase-like blossom of a
magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume
74

EMERSON

a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by
a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of
aspen, would not seem more as if it could
never have grown there than Emerson's voice
seems inspired and foreign to his visible and
natural body." Emerson's ever exquisite
and wonderful good taste seems closely con-
nected with this asceticism, and it is probable
that his taste influenced his views and conduct
to some small extent.

The anti-slavery people were not always
refined. They were constantly doing things
which were tactically very effective, but were
not calculated to attract the over-sensitive.
Garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism
was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell
Phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to
deal in personalities of an exasperating kind.
One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from
tiie taste of the Abolitionists. It was not
merely their doctrines or their methods which
offended him. He at one time refused to
give Wendell Phillips his hand because of
Phillips's treatment of his friend, Judge Hoar.
One hardly knows whether to be pleased at
Emerson for showing a human weakness, or
annoyed at him for not being more of a man.
The anecdote is valuable in both lights. It is
like a tiny speck on the crystal of his character
75

EMERSON

which shows us the exact location of the orb,
and it is the best illustration of the feeling of
the times which has come down to us.

If by " asceticism " we mean an experiment
in starving the senses, there is little harm in
it. Nature will soon reassert her dominion,
and very likely our perceptions will be sharp-
ened by the trial. But " natural asceticism "
is a thing hardly to be distinguished from
functional weakness. What is natural asceti-
cism but a lack of vigor? Does it not tend
to close the avenues between the soul and the
universe? " Is it not so much death? " The
accounts of Emerson show him to have been
a man in whom there was almost a hiatus
between the senses and the most inward spirit
of life. The lower register of sensations and
emotions which domesticate a man into fel-
lowship with common life was weak. Genial
familiarity was to him impossible ; laughter
was almost a pain. " It is not the sea and
poverty and pursuit that separate us. Here
is Alcott by my door, — yet is the union more
profound ? No ! the sea, vocation, poverty,
are seeming fences, but man is insular and
cannot be touched. Every man is an infi-
nitely repellent orb, and holds his individual
being on that condition. . . . Most of the
persons whom I see in my own house I see
76

EMERSON

across a gulf; I cannot go to them nor they
come to me."

This aloofness of Emerson must be remem-
bered only as blended with his benignity.
" His friends were all that knew him," and, as
Dr. Holmes said, " his smile was the well-
remembered line of Terence written out in
living features." Emerson's journals show
the difficulty of his intercourse even with him-
self. He could not reach himself at will, nor
could another reach him. The sensuous and
ready contact with nature which more carnal
people enjoy was unknown to him. He had
eyes for the New England landscape, but for
no other scenery. If there is one supreme
sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of
Venice seen from the water. This sight
greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The
famous city, as he approached it by boat,
" looked for some time like nothing but New
York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers,
but to my thought a most disagreeable resi-
dence. You feel always in prison and soli-
tary. It is as if you were always at sea. I
soon had enough of it."

Emerson's contempt for travel and for the

"rococo toy," Italy, is too well known to

need citation. It proceeds from the same

deficiency of sensation. His eyes saw noth-

EMERSON

ing; his ears heard nothing. He believed
that men travelled for distraction and to kill
time. The most vulgar plutocrat could not
be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from
Athens than this cultivated saint. Everything
in the world which must be felt with a glow
in the breast, in order to be understood, was
to him dead-letter. Art was a name to him ;
music was a name to him ; love was a name
to him. His essay on Love is a nice compila-
tion of compliments and elegant phrases end-
ing up with some icy morality. It seems
very well fitted for a gift-book or an old-fash-
ioned lady's annual.

" The lovers delight in endearments, in
avowals of love, in comparisons of their re-
gards. . . . The soul which is in the soul of
each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects
incongruities, defects, and disproportion in
the behavior of the other. Hence arise
surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that
which drew them to each other was signs of
loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues
are there, however eclipsed. They appear
and reappear and continue to attract; but
the regard changes, quits the sign and at-
taches to the substance. This repairs the
wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears
on, it proves a game of permutation and com-

EMERSON

bination of all possible positions of the par-
ties, to employ all the resources of each, and
acquaint each with the weakness of the
other. ... At last they discover that all
which at first drew them together — those
once sacred features, that magical play of
charms — was deciduous, had a prospective
end like the scaffolding by which the house
was built, and the purification of the intellect
and the heart from year to year is the real
marriage, foreseen and prepared from the
first, and wholly above their conscious-
ness. . . . Thus are we put in training for a
love which knows not sex nor person nor
partiality, but which seeks wisdom and virtue
everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue
and wisdom. . . . There are moments when
the affections rule and absorb the man, and
make his happiness dependent on a person or
persons. But in health the mind is presently
seen again," etc.

All this is not love, but the merest literary
coquetry. Love is different from this. Lady
Burton, when a very young girl, and six
years before her engagement, met Burton at
Boulogne. They met in the street, but did
not speak. A few days later they were for-
mally introduced at a dance. Of this she
writes: "That was a night of nights. He
79

EMERSON

waltzed with me once, and spoke to me
several times. I kept the sash where he put
his arm around me and my gloves, and never
wore them again."

A glance at what Emerson says about
marriage shows that he suspected that institu-
tion. He can hardly speak of it without
some sort of caveat or precaution. " Though
the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a
moral union of two superior persons whose
confidence in each other for long years, out
of sight and in sight, and against all appear-
ances, is at last justified by victorious proof
of probity to gods and men, causing joyful
emotions, tears, and glory, — though there be
for heroes this moral uniori, yet they too are
as far as ever from an intellectual union, and
the moral is for low and external purposes,
like the corporation of a ship's company or
of a fire club." In speaking of modern
novels, he says : " There is no new element,
no power, no furtherance. 'T is only confec-
tionery, not the raising of new corn. Great
is the poverty of their inventions. She was
beautiful, and he fell in love. . . . Happy
will that house be in which the relations are
formed by character; after the highest and
not after the lowest; the house in which
character marries and not confusion and a
80

EMERSON

miscellany of unavowable motives. ... To
each occurs soon after puberty, some event,
or society or way of living, which becomes
the crisis of life and the chief fact in their
history. In women it is love and marriage
(which is more reasonable), and yet it is
pitiful to date and measure all the facts and
sequel of an unfolding life from such a youth-
ful and generally inconsiderate period as the
age of courtship and marriage. . . . Women
more than all are the element and kingdom
of illusion. Being fascinated they fascinate.
They see through Claude Lorraines. And
how dare any one, if he could, pluck away
the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by
which they live ? Too pathetic, too pitiable,
is the region of affection, and its atmosphere
always liable to mirage."

We are all so concerned that a man who
writes about love shall tell the truth that if he
chance to start from premises which are false
or mistaken, his conclusions will appear not
merely false, but offensive. It makes no
matter how exalted the personal character of
the writer may be. Neither sanctity nor
intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they
be intensified to the point of incandescence,
can make up for a want of nature.

This perpetual splitting up of love into two
6 81

EMERSON

species, one of which is condemned, but
admitted to be useful — is it not degrading?
There is in Emerson's theory of the relation
between the sexes neither good sense, nor
manly feeling, nor sound psychology. It is
founded on none of these things. It is a pure
piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he
was bred to the priesthood. We are not to
imagine that there was in this doctrine any-
thing peculiar to Emerson. But we are sur-
prised to find the pessimism inherent in the
doctrine overcome Emerson, to whom pessi-
mism is foreign. Both doctrine and pessimism
are a part of the Puritanism of the times.
They show a society in which the intellect
had long been used to analyze the affections,
in which the head had become dislocated
from the body. To this disintegration of the
simple passion of love may be traced the lack
of maternal tenderness characteristic of the
New England nature. The relation between
the blood and the brain was not quite normal
in this civilization, nor in Emerson, who is
its most remarkable representative.

If we take two steps backward from the
canvas of this mortal life and glance at it im-
partially, we shall see that these matters of
love and marriage pass like a pivot through
the lives of almost every individual, and are,
82

EMERSON

sociologically speaking, the primum mobile of
the world. The books of any philosopher
who slurs them or distorts them will hold up
a false mirror to life. If an inhabitant of
another planet should visit the earth, he would
receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human
life by attending an Italian opera than he
would by reading Emerson's volumes. He
would learn from the Italian opera that there
were two sexes ; and this, after all, is proba-
bly the fact with which the education of such
a stranger ought to begin.

In a review of Emerson's personal charac-
ter and opinions, we are thus led to see that
his philosophy, which finds no room for the
emotions, is a faithful exponent of his own
and of the New England temperament, which
distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded
as a sole guide to life for a young person of
strong conscience and undeveloped affections,
his works might conceivably be even harmful
because of their unexampled power of purely
intellectual stimulation.

Emerson's poetry has given rise to much
heart-burning and disagreement Some peo-
ple do not like it. They fail to find the fire
in the ice. On the other hand, his poems
appeal not only to a large number of pro-
83

EMERSON

fessed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of
readers who find in Emerson an element for
which they search the rest of poesy in vain.

It is the irony of fate that his admirers
should be more than usually sensitive about
his fame. This prophet who desired not to
have followers, lest he too should become a
cult and a convention, and whose main thesis
throughout life was that piety is a crime, has
been calmly canonized and embalmed in am-
ber by the very forces he braved. He is
become a tradition and a sacred relic. You
must speak of him under your breath, and
you may not laugh near his shrine.

Emerson's passion for nature was not like
the passion of Keats or of Burns, of Coleridge
or of Robert Browning ; compared with these
men he is cold. His temperature is below
blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands
on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish
which in Caliban upon Setebos is described as
finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of
an ocean not his own.

But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very
extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose
verses carry a world of their own within them.
They are overshadowed by the greatness of
his prose, but they are authentic. He is the
chief poet of that school of which Emily
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EMERSON

Dickinson is a minor poet. His poetry is a
successful spiritual deliverance of great inter-
est. His worship of the New England land-
scape amounts to a religion. His poems do
that most wonderful thing, make us feel that
we are alone in the fields and with the trees, —
not English fields nor French lanes, but New
England meadows and uplands. There is no
human creature in sight, not even Emerson
is there, but the wind and the flowers, the
wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmos-
phere, the breath of nature. There is a deep
and true relation between the intellectual and
almost dry brilliancy of Emerson's feelings
and the landscape itself. Here is no de-
fective English poet, no Shelley without the
charm, but an American poet, a New England
poet with two hundred years of New England
culture and New England landscape in
him.

People are forever speculating upon what
will last, what posterity will approve, and
some people believe that Emerson's poetry
will outlive his prose. The question is idle.
The poems are alive now, and they may or
may not survive the race whose spirit they
embody ; but one thing is plain : they have
qualities which have preserved poetry in the
past. They are utterly indigenous and sin-
85

EMERSON

cere. They are short. They represent a
civilization and a climate.

His verse divides itself into several classes.
We have the single lyrics, written somewhat
in the style of the later seventeenth century.
Of these The Humble Bee is the most ex-
quisite, and although its tone and imagery
can be traced to various well-known and
dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an
imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste.
The Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a
few others belong to that class of poetry
which, like Abou Ben Adhem, is poetry be-
cause it is the perfection of statement. The
Boston Hymn, the Concord Ode, and the
other occasional pieces fall in another class,
and do not seem to be important. The first
two lines of the Ode,

" O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire."

are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of
some mythical Greek, some Simonides, some
Sappho, but the rest of the lines are com-
monplace. Throughout his poems there are
good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches
of grace. He himself knew the quality of his
poetry, and wrote of it,

" All were sifted through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true."
86

EMERSON

He is never merely conventional, and his po-
etry, like his prose, is homespun and sound.
But his ear was defective : his rhymes are
crude, and his verse is often lame and un-
musical, a fault which can be countervailed
by nothing but force, and force he lacks. To
say that his ear was defective is hardly strong
enough. Passages are not uncommon which
hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed ; as,
for example : —

" Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame :
1 Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am.' "

He himself has very well described the im-
pression his verse is apt to make on a new
reader when he says, —

" Poetry must not freeze, but flow."

The lovers of Emerson's poems freely ac-
knowledge all these defects, but find in them
another element, very subtle and rare, very
refined and elusive, if not altogether unique.
This is the mystical element or strain which
qualifies many of his poems, and to which
some of them are wholly devoted.

There has been so much discussion as to
Emerson's relation to the mystics that it is
well here to turn aside for a moment and
87

EMERSON

consider the matter by itself. The elusive-
ness of " mysticism " arises out of the fact
that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. It is
formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it
is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to
be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to
a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will
say nothing, but the presumption among
those who are inclined towards the cult is
that if these symbols convey anything at all,
that thing is mysticism. The mystics are
right. The familiar phrases, terms, and sym-
bols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a
glance at them shows that they do tend
to express and evoke a somewhat definite
psychic condition.

There is a certain mood of mind experi-
enced by most of us in which we feel the
mystery of existence ; in which our conscious-
ness seems to become suddenly separated
from our thoughts, and we find ourselves
asking, " Who am I ? What are these
thoughts?" The mood is very apt to over-
take us while engaged in the commonest acts.
In health it is always momentary, and seems
to coincide with the instant of the transition
and shift of our attention from one thing to
another. It is probably connected with the
transfer of energy from one set of faculties to

EMERSON

another set, which occurs, for instance, on
our waking from sleep, on our hearing a bell
at night, on our observing any common ob-
ject, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our
mind is or has just been thoroughly pre-
occupied with something else. This dis-
placement of the attention occurs in its most
notable form when we walk from the study
into the open fields. Nature then attacks us
on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and
destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely
and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissi-
pates all focus of thought and dissolves our
attention. If we happen to be mentally fa-
tigued, and we take a walk in the country,
a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy,
which nothing else on earth can give, accom-
panies this distraction of the mind from its
problems. The reaction fills us with a sense
of mystery and expansion. It brings us to
the threshold of those spiritual experiences
which are the obscure core and reality of our
existence, ever alive within us, but generally
veiled and sub-conscious. It brings us, as it
were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry,
and music. The condition is one of excita-
tion and receptiveness, where art may speak
and we shall understand. On the other hand,
the condition shows a certain dethronement
89

EMERSON

of the will and attention which may ally it to
the hypnotic state.

Certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of
nature by calling on us with a thousand voices
at once. Poetry deals often with vague or con-
tradictory statements, with a jumble of images,
a throng of impressions. But in true poetry
the psychology of real life is closely followed.
The mysticism is momentary. We are not kept
suspended in a limbo, " trembling like a guilty
thing surprised," but are ushered into another
world of thought and feeling. On the other
hand, a mere statement of inconceivable things
is the reductio ad absurdum of poetry, because
such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters
the attention, and does to a certain extent
superinduce the " blank misgivings " of mys-
ticism. It does this, however, zvithout going
further and filling the mind with new life. If
I bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and
then say, " I am the slayer and the slain, I am
the doubter and the doubt," I puzzle his mind,
and may succeed in reawakening in him the
sense he has often had come over him that we
are ignorant of our own destinies and cannot
grasp the meaning of life. If I do this, noth-
ing can be a more legitimate opening for a
poem, for it is an opening of the reader's
mind. Emerson, like many other highly or-
90

EMERSON

ganized persons, was acquainted with the
mystic mood. It was not momentary with
him. It haunted him, and he seems to have
believed that the whole of poetry and religion
was contained in the mood. And no one can
gainsay that this mental condition is intimately
connected with our highest feelings and leads
directly into them.

The fault with Emerson is that he stops in
the ante-chamber of poetry. He is content
if he has brought us to the hypnotic point.
His prologue and overture are excellent, but
where is the argument ? Where is the sub-
stantial artistic content that shall feed our
souls ?

The Sphinx is a fair example of an Emerson
poem. The opening verses are musical,
though they are handicapped by a reminis-
cence of the German way of writing. In the
succeeding verses we are lapped into a charm-
ing reverie, and then at the end suddenly
jolted by the question, "What is it all
about ? " In this poem we see expanded
into four or five pages of verse an experience
which in real life endures an eighth of a sec-
ond, and when we come to the end of the
mood we are at the end of the poem.

There is no question that the power to
throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a
9i

EMERSON

pass or two which shall give you his virgin
attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody
has the knack of this more strongly than
Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase
or a common remark he creates an ideal at-
mosphere in which his thought has the direct-
ness of great poetry. But he cannot do it
in verse. He seeks in his verse to do the
very thing which he avoids doing in his prose :
follow a logical method. He seems to know
too much what he is about, and to be content
with doing too little. His mystical poems,
from the point of view of such criticism as
this, are all alike in that they all seek to do
the same thing. Nor does he always succeed.
How does he sometimes fail in verse to say
what he conveys with such everlasting happi-
ness in prose !

" I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."

In these lines we have the same thought
which appears a few pages later in prose:
"All that Shakespeare says of the king,
yonder slip of a boy that reads in the
corner feels to be true of himself." He has
failed in the verse because he has thrown a
mystical gloss over a thought which was
92

EMERSON

stronger in its simplicity; because in the
verse he states an abstraction instead of giving
an instance. The same failure follows him
sometimes in prose when he is too conscious
of his machinery.

Emerson knew that the sense of mystery
accompanies the shift of an absorbed attention
to some object which brings the mind back to
the present. " There are times when the
cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, a
boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in
his field is more suggestive to the mind than
the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be
in another hour. In like mood, an old verse,
or certain words, gleam with rare significance."
At the close of his essay on History he is
trying to make us feel that all history, in so
far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and
is in a certain sense autobiography. He is
speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly
pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and
proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do
with the Romans. For this he has been quite
properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because
he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to
create an illusion. Indeed, Dr. Holmes is
somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a
gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state
very similar to that suggested by Emerson ;
93

EMERSON

and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his
jest, because alcohol does dislocate the atten-
tion in a thoroughly mystical manner.

There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as
throughout all of the New England poetry,
too much thought, too much argument.
Some of his verse gives the reader a very
curious and subtle impression that the lines
are a translation. This is because he is
closely following a thesis. Indeed, the lines
are a translation. They were thought first,
and poetry afterwards. Read off his poetry,
and you see through the scheme of it at once.
Read his prose, and you will be put to it to
make out the connection of ideas. The
reason is that in the poetry the sequence is
intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emo-
tional. It is no mere epigram to say that his
poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of
prose writing, and his prose by the laws of
poetry.

The lines entitled Days have a dramatic
vigor, a mystery, and a music all their own : —

" Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.

EMERSON

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."

The prose version of these lines, which in
this case is inferior, is to be found in Works and
Days : " He only is rich who owns the day. . . .
They come and go like muffled and veiled
figures, sent from a distant friendly party ; but
they say nothing, and if we do not use the
gifts they bring, they carry them as silently
away."

That Emerson had within him the soul of
a poet no one will question, but his poems
are expressed in prose forms. There are
passages in his early addresses which can be
matched in English only by bits from Sir
Thomas Browne or Milton, or from the great
poets. Heine might have written the follow-
ing parable into verse, but it could not have
been finer. It comes from the very bottom
of Emerson's nature. It is his uttermost.
Infancy and manhood and old age, the first
and the last of him, speak in it.

" Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
The young mortal enters the hall of the firma-
ment ; there is he alone with them alone, they
pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and
95

EMERSON

beckoning him up to their thrones. On the
instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of
illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd
which sways this way and that, and whose
movements and doings he must obey; he
fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant.
The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now
furiously commanding this thing to be done,
now that. What is he that he should resist
their will, and think or act for himself? Every
moment new changes and new showers of
deceptions to baffle and distract him. And
when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears
and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods
still sitting around him on their thrones, —
they alone with him alone."

With the war closes the colonial period of
our history, and with the end of the war
begins our national life. Before that time it
was not possible for any man to speak for the
nation, however much he might long to, for
there was no nation ; there were only discord-
ant provinces held together by the exercise
on the part of each of a strong and conscien-
tious will. It is too much to expect that
national character shall be expressed before
it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish
during a period when everybody is preoccu-

EMERSON

pied with the fear of revolution. The provin-
cial note which runs through all our literature
down to the war resulted in one sense from
our dependence upon Europe. " All Ameri-
can manners, language, and writings," says
Emerson, " are derivative. We do not write
from facts, but we wish to state the facts after
the English manner. It is the tax we pay for
the splendid inheritance of English Litera-
ture." But in a deeper sense this very
dependence upon Europe was due to our dis-
union among ourselves. The equivocal and
unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we
were consigned by fate, and which made us
perceive and resent the condescension of
foreigners, was the logical outcome of our
political situation.

The literature of the Northern States before
the war, although full of talent, lacks body,
lacks courage. It has not a full national tone.
The South is not in it. New England's share
in this literature is so large that small injustice
will be done if we give her credit for all of it.
She was the Academy of the land, and her
scholars were our authors. The country at
large has sometimes been annoyed at the self-
consciousness of New England, at the atmos-
phere of clique, of mutual admiration, of
isolation, in which all her scholars, except
7 97

EMERSON

Emerson, have lived, and which notably en-
veloped the last little distinguished group of
them. The circumstances which led to the
isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, and
the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive.
The ravages of the war carried off the poets,
scholars, and philosophers of the generation
which immediately followed these men, and
by destroying their natural successors left
them standing magnified beyond their natural
size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. The
war did more than kill off a generation of
scholars who would have succeeded these
older scholars. It emptied the universities
by calling all the survivors into the field of
practical life; and after the war ensued a
period during which all the learning of the
land was lodged in the heads of these older
worthies who had made their mark long be-
fore. A certain complacency which piqued
the country at large was seen in these men.
An ante-bellum colonial posing, inevitable in
their own day, survived with them. When
Jared Sparks put Washington in the proper
attitude for greatness by correcting his spell-
ing, Sparks was in cue with the times. It was
thought that a great man must have his hat
handed to him by his biographer, and be
ushered on with decency toward posterity.

EMERSON

In the lives and letters of some of our re-
cent public men there has been a reminis-
cence of this posing, which we condemn as
absurd because we forget it is merely archaic.
Provincial manners are always a little formal,
and the pomposity of the colonial governor
was never quite worked out of our literary
men.

Let us not disparage the past. We are all
grateful for the New England culture, and
especially for the little group of men in Cam-
bridge and Boston who did their best accord-
ing to the light of their day. Their purpose
and taste did all that high ideals and good
taste can do, and no more eminent literati
have lived during this century. They gave
the country songs, narrative poems, odes,
epigrams, essays, novels. They chose their
models well, and drew their materials from
decent and likely sources. They lived stain-
less lives, and died in their professors' chairs
honored by all men. For achievements of
this sort we need hardly use as strong lan-
guage as Emerson does in describing con-
temporary literature : " It exhibits a vast
carcass of tradition every year with as much
solemnity as a new revelation."

The mass and volume of literature must al-
ways be traditional, and the secondary writers
99

EMERSON

of the world do nevertheless perform a func-
tion of infinite consequence in the spread of
thought. A very large amount of first-hand
thinking is not comprehensible to the average
man until it has been distilled and is fifty
years old. The men who welcome new learn-
ing as it arrives are the picked men, the
minor poets of the next age. To their own
times these secondary men often seem great
because they are recognized and understood
at once. We know the disadvantage under
which these Humanists of ours worked. The
shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs
over us still. The conservatism and timidity
of our politics and of our literature to-day are
due in part to that fearful pressure which for
sixty years was never lifted from the souls of
Americans. That conservatism and timidity
may be seen in all our past. They are in
the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of
Hawthorne. They killed Poe. They created
Bryant.

Since the close of our most blessed war,
we have been left to face the problems
of democracy, unhampered by the terrible
complications of sectional strife. It has
happened, however, that some of the ten-
dencies of our commercial civilization go
toward strengthening and riveting upon us
ioo

EMERSON

the very traits encouraged by provincial
disunion. Wendell Phillips, with a cool
grasp of understanding for which he is not
generally given credit, states the case as
follows : —

"The general judgment is that the freest
possible government produces the freest pos-
sible men and women, the most individual,
the least servile to the judgment of others.
But a moment's reflection will show any man
that this is an unreasonable expectation, and
that, on the contrary, entire equality and free-
dom in political forms almost invariably tend
to make the individual subside into the mass
and lose his identity in the general whole.
Suppose we stood in England to-night. There
is the nobility, and here is the church. There
is the trading class, and here is the literary.
A broad gulf separates the four; and pro-
vided a member of either can conciliate his
own section, he can afford in a very large
measure to despise the opinions of the other
three. He has to some extent a refuge and a
breakwater against the tyranny of what we
call public opinion. But in a country like
ours, of absolute democratic equality, public
opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omni-
present. There is no refuge from its tyranny,
there is no hiding from its reach; and the

IOI

EMERSON

result is that if you take the old Greek lantern
and go about to seek among a hundred, you
will find not one single American who has
not, or who does not fancy at least that he
has, something to gain or lose in his ambition,
his social life, or his business, from the good
opinion and the votes of those around him.
And the consequence is that instead of being
a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurt-
ing out his own convictions, as a nation, com-
pared to other nations, we are a mass of
cowards. More than all other people, we are
afraid of each other."

If we take a bird's-eye view of our history,
we shall find that this constant element of
democratic pressure has always been so
strong a factor in moulding the character of
our citizens, that there is less difference than
we could wish to see between the types of
citizenship produced before the war and after
the war.

Charles Follen, that excellent and worthy
German who came to this country while still
a young man and who lived in the midst of
the social and intellectual life of Boston, felt
the want of intellectual freedom in the people
about him. If one were obliged to describe
the America of to-day in a single sentence,
one could hardly do it better than by a sen-

I02

EMERSON

tence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Mar-
tineau written in 1837, after the appearance
of one of her books : " You have pointed
out the two most striking national charac-
teristics, ' Deficiency of individual moral in-
dependence and extraordinary mutual respect
and kindness.' "

Much of what Emerson wrote about the
United States in 1850 is true of the United
States to-day. It would be hard to find a
civilized people who are more timid, more
cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It
is easy to-day for the educated man who
has read Bryce and Tocqueville to account
for the mediocrity of American literature.
The merit of Emerson was that he felt the
atmospheric pressure without knowing its
reason. He felt he was a cabined, cribbed,
confined creature, although every man about
him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy,
and every day was Fourth of July. He taxes
language to its limits in order to express his
revolt. He says that no man should write
except what he has discovered in the process
of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every
man will write well in proportion as he has
contempt for the public.

Emerson seems really to have believed that
if any man would only resolutely be himself,
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EMERSON

he would turn out to be as great as Shake-
speare. He will not have it that anything of
value can be monopolized. His review of the
world, whether under the title of Manners,
Self- Reliance, Fate, Experience, or what-not,
leads him to the same thought. His conclu-
sion is always the finding of eloquence,
courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the
humblest reader. He knows that we are full
of genius and surrounded by genius, and that
we have only to throw something off, not to
acquire any new thing, in order to be bards,
prophets, Napoleons, and Goethes. This
belief is the secret of his stimulating power.
It is this which gives his writings a radiance
like that which shone from his personality.

The deep truth shadowed forth by Emerson
when he said that " all the American geniuses
lacked nerve and dagger " was illustrated by
our best scholar. Lowell had the soul of the
Yankee, but in his habits of writing he con-
tinued English tradition. His literary essays
are full of charm. The Commemoration Ode
is the high-water mark of the attempt to do
the impossible. It is a fine thing, but it is
imitative and secondary. It has paid the in-
heritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of
pressure, Lowell assumed his real self under
the guise of a pseudonym; and with his
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EMERSON

own hand he rescued a language, a type, a
whole era of civilization from oblivion. Here
gleams the dagger and here is Lowell re-
vealed. His limitations as a poet, his too
much wit, his too much morality, his mixture
of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the
very elements of power. The novelty of the
Biglow Papers is as wonderful as their world-
old naturalness. They take rank with great-
ness, and they were the strongest political
tracts of their time. They imitate nothing;
they are real.

Emerson himself was the only man of his
times who consistently and utterly expressed
himself, never measuring himself for a moment
with the ideals of others, never troubling him-
self for a moment with what literature was or
how literature should be created. The other
men of his epoch, and among whom he lived,
believed that literature was a very desirable
article, a thing you could create if you were
only smart enough. But Emerson had no
literary ambition. He cared nothing for
belles-lettres. The consequence is that he
stands above his age like a colossus. While
he lived his figure could be seen from Europe
towering like Atlas over the culture of the
United States.

Great men are not always like wax which
io5

EMERSON

their age imprints. They are often the mere
negation and opposite of their age. They
give it the lie. They become by revolt the
very essence of all the age is not, and that
part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten
thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and
breaks into utterance in one. Through
Emerson spoke the fractional spirits of a
multitude. He had not time, he had not
energy left over to understand himself; he
was a mouthpiece.

If a soul be taken and crushed by democ-
racy till it utter a cry, that cry will be Emer-
son. The region of thought he lived in, the
figures of speech he uses, are of an intellectual
plane so high that the circumstances which
produced them may be forgotten ; they are
indifferent. The Constitution, Slavery, the
War itself, are seen as mere circumstances.
They did not confuse him while he lived;
they are not necessary to support his work
now that it is finished. Hence comes it that
Emerson is one of the world's voices. He
was heard afar off. His foreign influence
might deserve a chapter by itself. Conser-
vatism is not confined to this country. It is
the very basis of all government. The bolts
Emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his per-
ception, are not provincial. They were found
106

EMERSON

to carry inspiration to England and Germany.
Many of the important men of the last half-
century owe him a debt It is not yet possi-
ble to give any account of his influence
abroad, because the memoirs which will show
it are only beginning to be published. We
shall have them in due time; for Emerson
was an outcome of the world's progress.
His appearance marks the turning-point in
the history of that enthusiasm for pure
democracy which has tinged the political
thought of the world for the past one hun-
dred and fifty years. The youths of England
and Germany may have been surprised at
hearing from America a piercing voice of
protest against the very influences which were
crushing them at home. They could not
realize that the chief difference between
Europe and America is a difference in the
rate of speed with which revolutions in
thought are worked out.

While the radicals of Europe were revolt-
ing in 1848 against the abuses of a tyranny
whose roots were in feudalism, Emerson, the
great radical of America, the arch-radical of
the world, was revolting against the evils
whose roots were in universal suffrage. By
showing the identity in essence of all tyranny,
and by bringing back the attention of politi-
107

EMERSON

cal thinkers to its starting-point, the value of
human character, he has advanced the politi-
cal thought of the world by one step. He
has pointed out for us in this country to
what end our efforts must be bent.

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WALT WHITMAN

It would be an ill turn for an essay-writer
to destroy Walt Whitman, — for he was dis-
covered by the essayists, and but for them
his notoriety would have been postponed
for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of
"American Literature," and scarce a contrib-
utor to The Saturday Review but has at
one time or another raised a flag over him.

The history of these chronic discoveries of
Whitman as a poet, as a force, as a some-
thing or a somebody, would write up into
the best possible monograph on the incom-
petency of the Anglo-Saxon in matters of
criticism.

English literature is the literature of
genius, and the Englishman is the great
creator. His work outshines the genius of
Greece. His wealth outvalues the combined
wealth of all modern Europe. The English
mind is the only unconscious mind the world
has ever seen. And for this reason the
English mind is incapable of criticism.
hi

WALT WHITMAN

There has never been an English critic of
the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank;
and the critical work of England consists
either of an academical bandying of a few
old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or
Aristotle, or else of the merest impression-
ism, and wordy struggle to convey the sen-
timent awakened by the thing studied.

Now, true criticism means an attempt to
find out what something is, not for the pur-
pose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for
the purpose of illustrating something else,
nor for any other ulterior purpose whatever.

The so-called canons of criticism are of
about as much service to a student of liter-
ature as the Nicene Creed and the Lord's
Prayer are to the student of church history.
They are a part of his subject, of course,
but if he insists upon using them as a tape
measure and a divining-rod he will produce
a judgment of no possible value to any one,
and interesting only as a record of a most
complex state of mind.

The educated gentlemen of England have
surveyed literature with these time-honored
old instruments, and hordes of them long
ago rushed to America with their theodolites
and their quadrants in their hands. They
sized us up and they sized us down, and

112

WALT WHITMAN

they never could find greatness in literature
among us till Walt Whitman appeared and
satisfied the astrologers.

Here was a comet, a man of the people,
a new man, who spoke no known language,
who was very uncouth and insulting, who
proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and
who corresponded to the English imagination
with the unpleasant and rampant wildness
of everything in America, — with Mormon-
ism and car factories, steamboat explosions,
strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose
form violated every one of their minor
canons as America violated every one of
their social ideas.

Then, too, Whitman arose out of the war,
as Shakespeare arose out of the destruction
of the Armada, as the Greek poets arose out
of the repulse of the Persians. It was impos-
sible, it was unprecedented, that a national
revulsion should not produce national poetry
— and lo ! here was Whitman.

It may safely be said that the discovery
of Whitman as a poet caused many a hard-
thinking Oxford man to sleep quietly at
night. America was solved.

The Englishman travels, but he travels
after his mind has been burnished by the
university, and at an age when the best he
8 113

WALT WHITMAN

can do in the line of thought is to make an
intelligent manipulation of the few notions
he leaves home with. He departs an edu-
cated gentleman, taking with him his port-
manteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled
gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and
his portmanteau. He would as soon think
of getting his coats from Kansas as his
thoughts from travel. And therefore every
impression of America which the travelling
Englishman experienced confirmed his theory
of Whitman. Even Rudyard Kipling, who
does not in any sense fall under the above
description, has enough Anglo-Saxon blood
in him to see in this country only the ful-
filment of the fantastic notions of his child-
hood.

But imagine an Oxford man who had eyes
in his head, and who should come to this
country, never having heard of Whitman.
He would see an industrious and narrow-
minded population, commonplace and monot-
onous, so uniform that one man can hardly
be distinguished from another, law-abiding,
timid, and traditional; a community where
the individual is suppressed by law, custom,
and instinct, and in which, by consequence,
there are few or no great men, even count-
ing those men thrust by necessary operation
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WALT WHITMAN

of the laws of trade into commercial prom-
inence, and who claim scientific rather than
personal notice.

The culture of this people, its archi-
tecture, letters, drama, etc., he would find
were, of necessity, drawn from European
models; and in its poetry, so far as poetry
existed, he would recognize a somewhat
feeble imitation of English poetry. The
newspaper verses very fairly represent the
average talent for poetry and average appre-
ciation of it, and the newspaper verse of the
United States is precisely what one would
expect from a decorous and unimaginative
population, — intelligent, conservative, and
uninspired.

Above the newspaper versifiers float the
minor poets, and above these soar the greater
poets; and the characteristics of the whole
hierarchy are the same as those of the hum-
blest acolyte, — intelligence, conservatism,
conventional morality.

Above the atmosphere they live in, above
the heads of all the American poets, and
between them and the sky, float the Consti-
tution of the United States and the tradi-
tions and forms of English literature.

This whole culture is secondary and ter-
tiary, and it truly represents the respect-
"5

WALT WHITMAN

able mediocrity from which it emanates.
Whittier and Longfellow have been much
read in their day, — read by mill-hands and
clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and
doctors and divines, by the reading classes of
the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke
for, whose yearnings and spiritual life they
truly expressed.

Now, the Oxford traveller would not have
found Whitman at all. He would never have
met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a
man like him.

The traveller, as he opened his Saturday
Review upon his return to London, and
read the current essay on Whitman, would
have been faced by a problem fit to puzzle
Montesquieu, a problem to floor Goethe.

And yet Whitman is representative. He
is a real product, he has a real and most
interesting place in the history of literature,
and he speaks for a class and type of human
nature whose interest is more than local,
whose prevalence is admitted, — a type which
is one of the products of the civilization of
the century, perhaps of all centuries, and
which has a positively planetary significance.

There are, in every country, individuals
who, after a sincere attempt to take a place
in organized society, revolt from the drudgery
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WALT WHITMAN

of it, content themselves with the simplest
satisfactions of the grossest need of nature,
so far as subsistence is concerned, and re-
discover the infinite pleasures of life in the
open air.

If the roadside, the sky, the distant town,
the soft buffeting of the winds of heaven,
are a joy to the aesthetic part of man,
the freedom from all responsibility and ac-
countability is Nirvana to his moral nature.
A man who has once tasted these two joys
together, the joy of being in the open air and
the joy of being disreputable and unashamed,
has touched an experience which the most
close-knit and determined nature might well
dread. Life has no terrors for such a man.
Society has no hold on him. The trifling
inconveniences of the mode of life are as
nothing compared with its satisfactions.
The worm that never dies is dead in him.
The great mystery of consciousness and of
effort is quietly dissolved into the vacant
happiness of sensation, — ■ not base sensation,
but the sensation of the dawn and the sun-
set, of the mart and the theatre, and the
stars, the panorama of the universe.

To the moral man, to the philosopher or
the business man, to any one who is a cog
in the wheel of some republic, all these
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WALT WHITMAN

things exist for the sake of something else.
He must explain or make use of them, or
define his relation to them. He spends the
whole agony of his existence in an endeavor
to docket them and deal with them. Ham-
pered as he is by all that has been said and
done before, he yet feels himself driven on
to summarize, and wreak himself upon the
impossible task of grasping this cosmos
with his mind, of holding it in his hand,
of subordinating it to his purpose.

The tramp is freed from all this. By an
act as simple as death, he has put off effort
and lives in peace.

It is no wonder that every country in
Europe shows myriads of these men, as it
shows myriads of suicides annually. It is
no wonder, though the sociologists have been
late in noting it, that specimens of the type
are strikingly identical in feature in every
country of the globe.

The habits, the physique, the tone of
mind, even the sign-language and some of
the catch-words, of tramps are the same
everywhere. The men are not natally out-
casts. They have always tried civilized life.
Their early training, at least their early atti-
tude of mind towards life, has generally been
respectable. That they should be criminally
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WALT WHITMAN

inclined goes without saying, because their
minds have been freed from the sanctions
which enforce law. But their general inno-
cence is, under the circumstances, very re-
markable, and distinguishes them from the
criminal classes.

When we see one of these men sitting on
a gate, or sauntering down a city street, how
often have we wondered how life appeared
to him; what solace and what problems it
presented. How often have we longed to
know the history of such a soul, told, not
by the police-blotter, but by the poet or
novelist in the heart of the man!

Walt Whitman has given utterance to
the soul of the tramp. A man of genius
has passed sincerely and normally through
this entire experience, himself unconscious
of what he was, and has left a record of
it to enlighten and bewilder the literary
world.

In Whitman's works the elemental parts
of a man's mind and the fragments of imper-
fect education may be seen merging together,
floating and sinking in a sea of insensate
egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, dis-
gusting, extraordinary.

Our inability to place the man intellec-
tually, and find a type and reason for his
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WALT WHITMAN

intellectual state, comes from this : that the
revolt he represents is not an intellectual
revolt. Ideas are not at the bottom of it.
It is a revolt from drudgery. It is the
revolt of laziness.

There is no intellectual coherence in his
talk, but merely pathological coherence.
Can the insulting jumble of ignorance and
effrontery, of scientific phrase and French
paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective,
which he puts forward with the pretence
that it represents thought, be regarded, from
any possible point of view, as a philosophy,
or a system, or a belief? Is it individualism
of any statable kind ? Do the thoughts and
phrases which float about in it have a mean-
ing which bears any relation to the meaning
they bear in the language of thinkers? Cer-
tainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the
talk about the United States and its future,
have any significance as patriotism ? Does
it poetically represent the state of feeling of
any class of American citizens towards their
country? Or would you find the nearest
equivalent to this emotion in the breast of
the educated tramp of France, or Germany,
or England? The speech of Whitman is
English, and his metaphors and catch-words
are apparently American, but the emotional
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WALT WHITMAN

content is cosmic. He put off patriotism
when he took to the road.

The attraction exercised by his writings
is due to their flashes of reality. Of course
the man was a poseur, a most horrid mounte-
bank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps
of misused idea, of literary smartness, of
dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us.
The world of men remained for him as his
audience, and he did to civilized society the
continuous compliment of an insane self-
consciousness in its presence.

Perhaps this egotism and posturing is the
revenge of a stilled conscience, and we ought
to read in it the inversion of the social
instincts. Perhaps all tramps are poseurs.
But there is this to be said for Whitman,
that whether or not his posing was an acci-
dent of a personal nature, or an organic re-
sult of his life, he was himself an authentic
creature. He did not sit in a study and
throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived
a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not
by his poses, that he has survived.

The descriptions of nature, the visual
observation of life, are first-hand and won-
derful. It was no false light that led the
Oxonians to call some of his phrases Homeric.
The pundits were right in their curiosity over

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WALT WHITMAN

him ; they went astray only in their attempt
at classification.

It is a pity that truth and beauty turn to
cant on the second delivery, for it makes
poetry, as a profession, impossible. The
lyric poets have always spent most of their
time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the
very attempt disqualifies them.

A poet who discovers his mission is already
half done for; and even Wordsworth, great
genius though he was, succeeded in half
drowning his talents in his parochial
theories, in his own self-consciousness and
self-conceit.

Walt Whitman thought he had a mission.
He was a professional poet. He had pur-
poses and theories about poetry which he
started out to enforce and illustrate. He is
as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking
of himself the whole time. He belonged,
moreover, to that class of professionals who
are always particularly self-centred, auto-
cratic, vain, and florid, — the class of quacks.
There are, throughout society, men, and they
are generally men of unusual natural powers,
who, after gaining a little unassimilated
education, launch out for themselves and
set up as authorities on their own account.
They are, perhaps, the successors of the old

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WALT WHITMAN

astrologers, in that what they seek to estab-
lish is some personal professorship or pre-
dominance. The old occultism and mystery
was resorted to as the most obvious device
for increasing the personal importance of
the magician; and the chief difference to-
day between a regular physician and a quack
is, that the quack pretends to know it all.

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were
men of phenomenal capacity, who actually
invented a religion and created a community
by the apparent establishment of supernatu-
ral and occult powers. The phrenologists,
the venders of patent medicine, the Chris-
tian Scientists, the single-taxers, and all
who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make
the same majestic and pontifical appeal to
human nature. It is this mystical power,
this religious element, which floats them,
sells the drugs, cures the sick, and packs
the meetings.

By temperament and education Walt Whit-
man was fitted to be a prophet of this kind.
He became a quack poet, and hampered his
talents by the imposition of a monstrous
parade of rattletrap theories and professions.
If he had not been endowed with a perfectly
marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature be-
yond the reach and plumb of his rodomon-
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WALT WHITMAN

tade, he would have been ruined from the
start. As it is, he has filled his work with
grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few
lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor
and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself
and his mission.

He has the bad taste bred in the bone of
all missionaries and palmists, the sign-
manual of a true quack. This bad taste is
nothing more than the offensive intrusion of
himself and his mission into the matter in
hand. As for his real merits and his true
mission, too much can hardly be said in his
favor. The field of his experience was nar-
row, and not in the least intellectual. It
was narrow because of his isolation from
human life. A poet like Browning, or
Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals constantly
with the problems and struggles that arise
in civilized life out of the close relation-
ships, the ties, the duties and desires of the
human heart. He explains life on its social
side. He gives us some more or less cohe-
rent view of an infinitely complicated matter.
He is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly
trained and intelligent companion.

Walt Whitman has no interest in any of
these things. He was fortunately so very
ignorant and untrained that his mind was
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WALT WHITMAN

utterly incoherent and unintellectual. His
mind seems to be submerged and to have
become almost a part of his body. The utter
lack of concentration which resulted from
living his whole life in the open air has left
him spontaneous and unaccountable. And
the great value of his work is, that it rep-
resents the spontaneous and unaccountable
functioning of the mind and body in health.

It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed
life more intensely than Walt Whitman, or
expressed the physical joy of mere living
more completely. He is robust, all tingling
with health and the sensations of health.
All that is best in his poetry is the expres-
sion of bodily well-being.

A man who leaves his office and gets into
a canoe on a Canadian river, sure of ten
days' release from the cares of business and
housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as
Walt Whitman has here and there thrown
into his poetry. One might say that to have
done this is the greatest accomplishment in
literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his
lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives
us life in the throb.

It is the throb of the whole physical sys-
tem of a man who breathes the open air and
feels the sky over him. " When lilacs last
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WALT WHITMAN

in the dooryard bloomed " is a great lyric.
Here is a whole poem without a trace of
self-consciousness. It is little more than
a description of nature. The allusions to
Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word
or two — merest suggestions of the tragedy.
But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every
line of it, the grief which has been trans-
muted into this sensitiveness to the land-
scape, to the song of the thrush, to the
lilac's bloom, and the sunset.

Here is truth to life of the kind to be
found in King Lear or Guy Mannering, in
iEschylus or Burns.

Walt Whitman himself could not have told
you why the poem was good. Had he had
any intimation of the true reason, he would
have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and
antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought
of death, the beauty of nature, are in a bal-
ance and dream of natural symmetry such as
no cunning could come at, no conscious art
could do other than spoil.

It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limita-
tions, his lack of human passion, the false-
ness of many of his notions about the
American people, The man knew the world
merely as an observer, he was never a living
part of it, and no mere observer can under-
126

1
1

WALT WHITMAN

stand the life about him. Even his work
during the war was mainly the work of an
observer, and his poems and notes upon the
period are picturesque. As to his talk about
comrades and Manhattanese car-drivers, and
brass-founders displaying their brawny arms
round each other's brawny necks, all this
gush and sentiment in Whitman's poetry is
false to life. It has a lyrical value, as rep-
resenting Whitman's personal feelings, but
no one else in the country was ever found
who felt or acted like this.

In fact, in all that concerns the human
relations Walt Whitman is as unreal as, let
us say, William Morris, and the American
mechanic would probably prefer Sigurd the
Volsung, and understand it better than
Whitman's poetry.

This falseness to the sentiment of the
American is interwoven with such won-
derful descriptions of American sights and
scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cata-
racts, and machine-shops that it is not
strange the foreigners should have accepted
the gospel.

On the whole, Whitman, though he solves
none of the problems of life and throws no
light on American civilization, is a delight-
ful appearance, and a strange creature to
127

WALT WHITMAN

come out of our beehive. This man com-
mitted every unpardonable sin against our
conventions, and his whole life was an out-
rage. He was neither chaste, nor industri-
ous, nor religious. He patiently lived upon
cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph.

He did really live the life he liked to live,
in defiance of all men, and this is a great
desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave,
in his writings, a true picture of himself and
of that life, — a picture which the world had
never seen before, and which it is probable
the world will not soon cease to wonder at.

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A STUDY OF ROMEO

The plays of Shakespeare marshal them-
selves in the beyond. They stand in a place
outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is
greater than our philosophy. They are like
the forces of nature and the operations of
life in the vivid world about us. We may
measure our intellectual growth by the new
horizons we see opening within them. So
long as they continue to live and change, to
expand and deepen, to be filled with new
harmony and new suggestion, we may rest
content ; we are still growing. At the mo-
ment we think we have comprehended them,
at the moment we see them as stationary
things, we may be sure something is wrong ;
we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh
interest in life has been arrested. There
is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size
up " Shakespeare. We cannot help setting
down as a coxcomb any man who has done
it to his own satisfaction. He has pigeon-
holed himself. He will not get lost. If
131

A STUDY OF ROMEO

you want him, you can lay your hand on
him. He has written an autobiography.
He has " sized up " himself.

In writing about Shakespeare, it is excus-
able to put off the armor of criticism, and
speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive
manner, lest by giving way to conviction,
by encouraging ourselves into positive be-
liefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old
before our time.

Perhaps some such apology is needed to
introduce the observations on the character
of Romeo which are here thrown together,
and the remarks about the play itself, the
acting, and the text.

It is believed by some scholars that in the
second quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet,
published in 1599, Shakespeare's revising
hand can be seen, and that the differences
between the first and second editions show
the amendments, additions, and corrections
with which Shakespeare saw fit to embellish
his work in preparing it for the press. If
this were actually the case; if we could lay
the two texts on the table before us, con-
vinced that one of them was Shakespeare's
draft or acting copy, and the other Shake-
speare's finished work; and if, by comparing
132

A STUDY OF ROMEO

the two, we could enter into the workshop
and forge of his mind, — it would seem as if
we had at last found an avenue of approach
towards this great personality, this intellect
the most powerful that has ever illumined
human life. No other literary inquiry could
compare in interest with such a study as
this; for the relation which Shakespeare
himself bore to the plays he created is one
of the mysteries and blank places in his-
tory, a gap that staggers the mind and which
imagination cannot overleap.

The student who examines both texts will
be apt to conclude that the second is by no
means a revised edition of the first, but that
(according to another theory) the first is a
pirated edition of the play, stolen by the
printer, and probably obtained by means of
a reporter who took down the lines as they
were spoken on the stage. The stage direc-
tions in the first edition are not properly the
stage directions of a dramatist as to what
should be done on the stage, but seem rather
the records of an eye-witness as to what he
saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of
the reporter (or the perversions of the actors)
as seen in the first edition generally injure
the play; and it was from this circumstance
— the frequency of blotches in the first edi-
i33

A STUDY OF ROMEO

tion — that the idea gained currency that the
second edition was an example of Shake-
speare's never-failing tact in bettering his
own lines.

Perhaps, after all, it would little advance
our understanding of the plays, or solve the
essential puzzle, — that they actually had an
author, — if we could follow every stroke of
his revising pen. We should observe, no
doubt, refinement of characterization, changes
of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and
beauties ; but their origin and true meaning,
the secret of their life, would be as safe as
it is at present, as securely lost in the midst
of all this demonstration as the manuscripts
themselves were in the destruction of the
Globe Theatre.

If we must then abandon the hope of see-
ing Shakespeare in his workshop, we may,
nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text
some notion of the manner in which Shake-
speare was staged in his own day, and of how
he fared at the hands of the early actors.
Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally diffi-
cult play to act, and the difficulties seem to
have been about the same in Shakespeare's
time as they are to-day. They are, in fact,
inherent in the structure of the work itself.

As artists advance in life, they develop,
i34

A STUDY OF ROMEO

by growing familiar with the conditions of
their art, the power of concealing its limita-
tions, — a faculty in which even the greatest
artists are often deficient in their early years.
There is an anecdote of Schumann which
somewhat crudely illustrates this. It is said
that in one of his early symphonies he intro-
duced a passage leading up to a climax, at
which the horns were to take up the aria
in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the
moment came for the horns to trumpet forth
their message of victory, there was heard a
sort of smothered braying which made every-
body laugh. The composer had arranged his
climax so that it fell upon a note which the
horns could not sound except with closed
stops. The passage had to be rewritten.
The young painter is frequently found strug-
gling with subjects, with effects of light,
which are almost impossible to render, and
which perhaps an older man would not at-
tempt. It is not surprising to find among
the early works of Shakespeare that some of
the characters, however true to life, — nay,
because true to life, — are almost impossible
to be represented on the stage. Certainly
Romeo presents us with a character of the
kind.

Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature
i35

A STUDY OF ROMEO

seems to have antedated his knowledge of
the stage. In imagining the character of
Romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old
story, he took little thought for his actors.
In conjuring up the probabilities which would
lead a man into such a course of conduct as
Romeo's, Shakespeare had in his mind the
probabilities and facts in real life rather than
the probabilities demanded by the stage.

Romeo must be a man almost wholly made
up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric
poet in the intensity of his sensations, a
child in his helplessness beneath the ever-
varying currents and whirlpools of his feel-
ing. He lives in a walking and frenzied
dream, comes in contact with real life only
to injure himself and others, and finally
drives with the collected energy of his being
into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of
the world.

This man must fall in love at first sight.
He must marry clandestinely. He must be
banished for having taken part in a street
fight, and must return to slay himself upon
the tomb of his beloved.

Shakespeare, with his passion for realism,
devotes several scenes at the opening of the
play to the explanation of Romeo's state of
mind. He will give us a rationalistic ac-

i36

A STUDY OF ROMEO

count of love at first sight by bringing on
this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion
owing to his rejection by a woman not other-
wise connected with the story. It is per-
fectly true that this is the best and perhaps
the only explanation of love at first sight.
The effect upon Romeo's very boyish, unreal,
and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the
rejection (for which we must always respect
Rosaline) is to throw him, and all the un-
stable elements of which he is made, into a
giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it
will require only the glance of a pair of eyes
to precipitate into the very elixir of true
love.

All this is true, but no audience cares
about the episode or requires the explana-
tion. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental
notion of many persons to this day, and in
many stage versions it is avoided.

These preparatory scenes bring out in a
most subtle way the egoism at the basis of
Romeo's character, — the same lyrical egoism
that is in all his language and in all his
conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is
already in an uneasy dream. He is wander-
ing, aloof from his friends and absorbed in
himself. On meeting Juliet he passes from
his first dream into a second dream. On
*37

A STUDY OF ROMEO

learning of the death of Juliet he passes into
still a third and quite different dream, — or
stage of dream, — a stage in which action is
necessary, and in which he displays the cal-
culating intellect of a maniac. The mental
abstraction of Romeo continues even after
he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden,
despite the directness of Juliet, he is still
in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the
hour turns all his thoughts, not into love,
but into poetry. Juliet's anxieties are prac-
tical. She asks him about his safety, how
he came there, how he expects to escape.
He answers in madrigals. His musings are
almost impersonal. The power of the moon-
light is over him, and the power of the scene,
of which Juliet is only a part.

" With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls ;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.

Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear

That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops —

It is my soul that calls upon my name :

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears."

These reflections are almost " asides. " They
ought hardly to be spoken aloud. They

138

A STUDY OF ROMEO

denote that Romeo is still in his trance.
They have, however, another and unfortu-
nate influence: they retard the action of
the play. As we read the play to our-
selves, this accompaniment of lyrical feel-
ing on Romeo's part does not interfere
with our enjoyment. It seems to accentu-
ate the more direct and human strain of
Juliet's love.

But on the stage the actor who plays
Romeo requires the very highest powers.
While speaking at a distance from Juliet,
and in a constrained position, he must by
his voice and gestures convey these subtlest
shades of feeling, throw these garlands of
verse into his talk without interrupting its
naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a
manner that the audience feels they are in
place, even as the reader does. It is no
wonder that the role of Romeo is one of
the most difficult in all Shakespeare. The
demands made upon the stage are almost
more than the stage can meet. The truth to
nature is of a kind that the stage is almost
powerless to render.

The character of Romeo cannot hope to
be popular. Such pure passion, such un-
reasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven
in a man. He must roll on the floor and
i39

1 .V1

A STUDY OF ROMEO

blubber and kick. There is no getting away
from this. He is not Romeo unless he cries
like a baby or a Greek hero. This is the
penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he
used his mind more upon the problems of
his love, and less upon its celebration in
petalled phrases, his mind would not have
deserted him so lamentably in the hour of
his need. In fact, throughout the play,
Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in
fair danger of becoming contemptible. For
one instant only does he rise into respecta-
bility, — at the moment of his quarrel with
Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life
by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a
man. The ranting manner in which it is
customary to give Romeo's words in this
passage of the play shows how far most actors
are from understanding the true purport of
the lines; how far from realizing that these
few lines are the only opportunity the actor
has of establishing the character of Romeo
as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage,
a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero
of a play : —

" Alive, in triumph ! and Mercutio slain !
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now I
Now, Tybalt, take the ' villain ' back again
140

A STUDY OF ROMEO

That late thou gav'st me ; — for Mercutio's soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company :
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him."

The first three lines are spoken by Romeo
to himself. They are a reflection, not a
declamation, — a reflection upon which he
instantly acts. He assumes the calmness
of a man of his rank who is about to fight.
More than this, Romeo, the man of words
and moods, when once roused, as we shall
see later, in a worser cause, — when once
pledged to action, — Romeo shines with a
sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is
now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We
feel sure that he will kill Tybalt in the en-
counter. The appeal to the supernatural is
in his very gesture. The audience — nay,
Tybalt himself — gazes with awe on this
sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of
action.

This highly satisfactory conduct is soon
swept away by his behavior on hearing the
news of his banishment. The boy seems to
be without much stamina, after all. He is
a pitiable object, and does not deserve the
love of fair lady.

At Mantua the tide. of his feelings has
turned again, and by one of those natural
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A STUDY OF ROMEO

reactions which he himself takes note of he
wakes up unaccountably happy, " and all this
day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him above
the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is
the lightning before the thunderbolt.

" Her body sleeps to Capel's monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault,
And presently took post to tell it you."

Balthasar makes no attempt to break the
news gently. The blow descends on Romeo
when he least expects it. He is not spared.
The conduct of Romeo on hearing of Juliet's
death is so close to nature as to be nature
itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost
impossible to be given on the stage. He
does nothing. He is stunned. He collapses.
For fully five minutes he does not speak,
and yet in these five minutes he must show
to the audience that his nature has been
shaken to its foundations. The delirium of
miraculously beautiful poetry is broken.
His words are gone. His emotion is para-
lyzed, but his mind is alert. He seems sud-
denly to be grown up, — a man, and not a
boy, — and a man of action. " Is it even
so ? " is all he says. He orders post-horses,
ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences ; it
142

A STUDY OF ROMEO

is evident that before speaking at all he has
determined what he will do, and from now
on to the end of the play Romeo is different
from his old self, for a new Romeo has ap-
peared. He is in a state of intense and
calm exultation. All his fluctuating emo-
tions have been stilled or stunned. He
gives his orders in staccato. We feel that
he knows what he is going to do, and will
certainly accomplish it. Meanwhile his
mind is dominant. It is preternaturally ac-
tive. His "asides," which before were lyr-
ical, now become the comments of an acute
intellect. His vivid and microscopic recol-
lection of the apothecary shop, his philo-
sophical bantering with the apothecary, his
sudden violence to Balthasar at the entrance
to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness,
his words and conflict with Paris, whom he
kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as
it were, with his left hand, without malice
and without remorse, — all these things show
an intellect working at high pressure, while
the spirit of the man is absorbed in another
and more important matter.

There is a certain state of mind in which

the will to do is so soon followed by the act

itself that one may say the act is automatic.

The thought has already begun to be exe-

i43

A STUDY OF ROMEO

cuted even while it is being formed. This
occurs especially where the intent is to do
some horrid deed which requires preparation,
firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above
all, external calmness.

" Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream :
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council ; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

This is the phase through which Romeo is
passing on the way from Mantua to Verona.
His own words give us a picture of him
during that ride: —

"What said my man when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode ? "

He has come like an arrow, his mind closed
to the external world, himself in the blind
clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on
towards its fulfilment. Only at the end,
when he stands before the bier of Juliet,
sure of his will, beyond the reach of hin-
drance, alone for the first time, — only then
is his spirit released in floods of eloquence;
then does his triumphant purpose break into
speech, and his words soar up like the flames
144

A STUDY OF ROMEO

of a great bonfire of precious incense stream-
ing upward in exultation and in happiness.

The whole course of these last scenes of
Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than
this description of them, is in the highest
degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in
the nature of things so difficult to present
on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The
very long, the very minute description of
the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose
heart has stopped beating, but whose mind
is at work more actively and more accurately
than it has ever worked before, is a thing
highly sane as to its words. It must be done
quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must
be created, which is created upon Balthasar,
that Romeo is not in his right mind. A
friend seeing him would cross the street to
ask what was the matter.

The whole character of Romeo, from the
beginning, has been imagined with reference
to this self-destroying consummation. From
his first speech we might have suspected that
something destructive would come out of this
man.

There is a type of highly organized being,
not well fitted for this world, whose practi-
cal activities are drowned in a sea of feeling.
Egoists by their constitution, they become
10 i45

A STUDY OF ROMEO

dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or
thwarted by society. Their fine energies
have had no training in the painful con-
structive processes of civilization. Their
first instincts, when goaded into activity,
are instincts of destruction. They know no
compromise. If they are not to have all,
then no one shall possess anything. Romeo
is not suffering in this final scene. He is
experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life.
He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul.
It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The
deed brings widespread desolation, but to this
he is indifferent, for it means the destruction
of the prison against which his desires have
always beaten their wings, the destruction of
a material and social univerce from which he
has always longed to be free.

" O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."

How much of all this psychology may we
suppose was rendered apparent to the motley
collection of excitable people who flocked to
see the play — which appears to have been a
popular one — in the years 1591-97? Prob-
ably as much as may be gathered by an audi-
146

A STUDY OF ROMEO

ence to-day from a tolerable representation
of the piece. The subtler truths of Shake-
speare have always been lost upon the stage.
In turning over the first quarto of Romeo
and Juliet, we may see that many such mat-
ters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors.
The early audiences, like the popular audi-
ences of to-day, doubtless regarded action
as the first merit of a play, and the stage
managers must have understood this. It is
noticeable that, in the authentic text, the
street fight with which this play opens is a
carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to
a climax in the entry of the prince. The
reporter gives a few words only to a descrip-
tion of the scene. No doubt, in Shake-
speare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly
or all at once. It is impossible that the
longer plays, like King Lear, should have
been finished in an evening, unless the
scenes moved with a hurry of life very
different from the declamatory leisure with
which our actors move from scene to scene.
To make plain the course of the story was
evidently the chief aim of the stage man-
agers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is
true that the choruses in Shakespeare are
generally so overloaded with curious orna-
ment as to be incomprehensible except as
i47

A STUDY OF ROMEO

explanations of things already understood.
The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle
to which the play is the answer. One might
at first suppose that the need of such finger-
posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull
person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's
choruses. They play variations on the theme.
They instruct only the instructed.

If interest in the course of the story be the
first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest
in seeing a picture of contemporary manners
is probably the second. Our chief loss in
reading Shakespeare is the loss of the society
he depicts, and which we know only through
him. In every line and scene there must
be meanings which have vanished forever
with the conditions on which they comment.
A character on the stage has need, at the
feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will
remind us of something we know in real life.
The types of Shakespeare which have been
found substantial enough to survive the loss
of their originals must have had an interest
for the first audiences, both in nature and in
intensity, very different from their interest to
us. The high life depicted by Shakespeare
has disappeared. No one of us has ever
known a Mercutio. Fortunately, the types
of society seem to change less in the lower

A STUDY OF ROMEO

orders than in the upper classes. England
swarms with old women like Juliet's nurse;
and as to these characters in Shakespeare
whose originals still survive, and as to them
only, we may feel that we are near the
Elizabethans.

We should undoubtedly suffer some disen-
chantment by coming in contact with these
coarse and violent people. How much do
the pictures of contemporary England given
us by the novelists stand in need of correc-
tion by a visit to the land ! How different
is the thing from the abstract ! Or, to put
the same thought in a more obvious light,
how fantastic are the ideas of the Germans
about Shakespeare! How Germanized does
he come forth from their libraries and from
their green-rooms !

We in America, with our formal manners,
our bloodless complexions, our perpetual
decorum and self-suppression, are about as
rnuch in sympathy with the real element of
Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is
with a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by
the narration, but our constitution could
never stand the reality. As we read we
translate all things into the dialect of our
province; or if we must mouth, let us say
that we translate the dialect of the English
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A STUDY OF ROMEO

province into the language of our empire;
but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspec-
tion, would turn out to be not a gentleman,
— and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most
extraordinary young person ; Tybalt, a brute
and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and
the only man with whom we should feel at
all at ease would be the County Paris, in
whom we should all recognize a perfectly
bred man. "What a man!" we should cry.
" Why, he 's a man of wax ! "

JS0

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Michael Angelo is revealed by his son-
nets. He wears the triple crown of painter,
poet, and sculptor, and his genius was wor-
shipped with a kind of awe even while he
lived, yet we know the man best through
these little pieces of himself which he broke
off and gave to his friends. The fragments
vibrated with the life of the man, and
were recognized as wonderful things. Even
in his lifetime they were treasured and col-
lected in manuscript, and at a later day they
were seized upon by the world at large.

The first published edition of the son-
nets was prepared for the press many
years after the death of the author by his
grandnephew, who edited them to suit the
taste of the seventeenth century. The ex-
tent and atrocity of his emendations can be
realized by a comparison of texts. But the
sonnets survived the improvements, and even
made headway under them; and when, in
1863, Guasti gave the original readings to
153

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

the public, the world was prepared for them.
The bibliography of editions and transla-
tions which Guasti gives is enough to show
the popularity of the sonnets, their universal
character, their international currency.

There are upward of one hundred sonnets
in every stage of perfection, and they have
given rise not only to a literature of transla-
tions, but to a literature of comment. Some
years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a
selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian
text, together with English translations by
various hands. This little volume has earned
the gratitude of many to whom it made known
the sonnets. The Italians themselves have
gone on printing the corrupt text in con-
tempt of Guasti 's labors. But it has not
been left to the Italians to protect the treas-
ures of their land. The barbarians have
been the devoutest worshippers at all times.
The last tribute has come from Mr. John
Addington Symonds, who has done the son-
nets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites,
and done them, on the whole, amazingly
well. His translations of the more graceful
sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise
at times into beauty. He has, however, in-
sisted on polishing the rugged ones. More-
over, being deficient in reverence, Mr.
J54

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Symonds fails to convey reverence. Never-
theless, to have boldly planned and carried
out the task of translating them all was an
undertaking of so much courage, and has
been done with so much success, that every
rival must give in his admiration.

The poems are exceedingly various, some
being rough and some elegant, some obvious
and some obscure, some humorous, some
religious. Yet they have this in common,
that each seems to be the bearer of some
deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and
whose truth we recognize. From the very
beginning they seem to have had a provoca-
tive and stimulating effect upon others ; ever
since they were written, cultivated people
have been writing essays about them. One
of them has been the subject of repeated aca-
demical disquisition. They absorb and reflect
the spirit of the times; they appeal to and
express the individual; they have done this
through three centuries and throughout who
shall say how many different educational
conditions. Place them in what light you
will, they gleam with new meanings. This
is their quality. It is hard to say whence
the vitality comes. They have often a bril-
liancy that springs from the juxtaposition
of two thoughts, — a brilliancy like that pro-
J55

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

duced by unblended colors roughly but well
laid on. They have, as it were, an organic
force which nothing can render. The best
of them have the reflective power which gives
back light from the mind of the reader. The
profounder ones appear to change and glow
under contemplation ; they re-echo syllables
from forgotten voices ; they suggest unfathom-
able depths of meaning. These sonnets are
protean in character ; they represent different
things to different people, — religion to one,
love to another, philosophy to a third.

It is easy to guess what must be the fate
of such poems in translation. The transla-
tor inevitably puts more of himself than of
Michael Angelo into his version. Even the
first Italian editor could not let them alone.
He felt he must dose them with elegance.
This itching to amend the sonnets results
largely from the obscurity of the text. A
translator is required to be, above all things,
comprehensible, and, therefore, he must
interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not
at liberty to retain the equivocal sugges-
tiveness of the original. The language of a
translation must be chastened, or, at least,
grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is
very often neither the one nor the other.

The selections which follow are not given
156

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

as representative of the different styles in
the original. They have been chosen from
among those sonnets which seemed most
capable of being rendered into English.

The essential nature of the sonnet is re-
plete with difficulty, and special embarrass-
ments are encountered in the Italian sonnet.
The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and
spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea
of what poetry should be, that no cultivation
can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The
seeds of flowers from the Alps may be
planted in our gardens, but a new kind of
flower will come up; and this is what has
happened over and over again to the skilled
gardeners of English literature in their
struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy,
for six hundred years, the sonnet has been
the authorized form for a disconnected re-
mark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so
much to express a feeling as an idea — a
witticism — a conceit — a shrewd saying — a
clever analogy — a graceful simile — a beau-
tiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily
intended for the public; it has a social rather
than a literary function.

The English with their lyrical genius have
impressed the form, as they have impressed
every other form, into lyrical service, and
J57

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

with some success, it must be admitted. But
the Italian sonnet is not lyrical. It is con-
versational and intellectual, and many things
which English instinct declares poetry ought
not to be. We feel throughout the poetry
of the Latin races a certain domination of
the intelligence which is foreign to our own
poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we
may sympathize with this domination. Let
us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they
were prose ; let us seek first the thought and
hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take
care of itself. It is the thought, after all,
which Michael Angelo himself cared about.
He is willing to sacrifice elegance, to trun-
cate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and
grammar, if he can only hurl through the
verse these thoughts whicn were his con-
victions.

The platonic ideas about life and love
and art, which lie at the bottom of most of
these sonnets, are familiar to us all. They
have been the reigning commonplace ideas
of educated people for the last two thousand
years. But in these sonnets they are touched
with new power; they become exalted into
mystical importance. We feel almost as if
it were Plato himself that is talking, and the
interest is not lessened when we remember

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

that it is Michael Angelo. It is necessary
to touch on this element in the sonnets, for
it exists in them ; and because while some
will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man,
others will be most struck by his great
speculative intellect.

It is certain that the sonnets date from
various times in Michael Angelo' s life; and,
except in a few cases, it must be left to the
instinct of the reader to place them. Those
which were called forth by the poet's friend-
ship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly
written towards the close of his life. While
he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna
and to have been greatly attached to her for
many years, it is certain that in his old age
he fell in love with her. The library of
romance that has been written about this
attachment has added nothing to Condivi's
simple words : — ■

" He greatly loved the Marchesana of
Pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in
love, and was in return passionately beloved
of her ; and he still keeps many of her let-
ters, which are full of most honest and ten-
derest love, such as used to issue from a
heart like hers ; and he himself had written
her many and many a sonnet full of wit and
tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other
J59

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

places, where she had gone for pleasure, and
to pass the summer, and came to Rome for
no other reason than to see Michael Angelo.
And in return he bore her so much love
that I remember hearing him say that he
regretted nothing except that when he went
to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed
her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her
hand. He was many times overwhelmed at
the thought of her death, and used to be as
one out of his mind."

It seems, from reading the sonnets, that
some of those which are addressed to women
must belong to a period anterior to his friend-
ship with Vittoria. This appears from the
internal evidence of style and feeling, as
well as by references in the later sonnets.

One other fact must be mentioned, — both
Vittoria and Michael Angelo belonged to,
or at least sympathized with, the Piagnoni,
and were in a sense disciples of Savonarola.
Now, it is this religious element which makes
Michael Angelo seem to step out of his
country and out of his century and across
time and space into our own. This reli-
gious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar
to us ; indeed, of a kind inborn and native
to us. Whether we be reading the English
prayer-book or listening to the old German
160

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Passion Music, there is a certain note of the
spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly
recognize as a part of ourselves. What we
recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which
swept over Europe during the century of
Michael Angelo's existence; which con-
quered Teutonic Europe, and was conquered,
but not extinguished, in Latin Europe ; and
a part of which survives in ourselves. If
one wishes to feel the power of Savonarola,
one may do so in these sonnets. We had
connected Michael Angelo with the Renais-
sance, but we are here face to face with the
Reformation. We cannot help being a little
surprised at this. We cannot help being
surprised at finding how well we know this
man.

Few of us are familiar enough with the
language of the plastic arts to have seen
without prompting this same modern ele-
ment in Michael Angelo's painting and
sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recog-
nized it in the Pieta in St. Peter's. We
may safely say, however, that it exists in all
his works. It is in the Medicean statues;
it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the
Sistine ceiling. What is there in these
figures that they leave us so awestruck, that
they seem so like the sound of trumpets
ii 161

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

blowing from a spiritual world? The in-
telligence that could call them forth, the
craft that could draw them, have long since
perished. But the meaning survives the
craft. The lost arts retain their power over
us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are
thrilled. We cannot decipher the signs, yet
we subscribe to their import. The world
from which Michael Angelo's figures speak
is our own world, after all. That is the
reason they are so potent, so intimate, so
inimitably significant. We may be sure
that the affinity which we feel with Michael
Angelo, and do not feel with any other artist
of that age, springs from experiences and
beliefs in him which are similar to our
own.

His work speaks to the moral sense more
directly and more powerfully than that of
any one, — so directly and so powerfully,
indeed, that we whose physical senses are
dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are
moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest
of the cinque cento culture remain a closed
book to us.

It is difficult, this conjuring with the un-
recoverable past, so rashly done by us all.
Yet we must use what light we have. Re-
membering, then, that painting is not the
162

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

reigning mode of expression in recent times,
and that in dealing with it we are dealing
with a vehicle of expression with which we
are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet
draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if
we base them upon the identity of one man's
nature some part of which we are sure we
understand. We may throw a bridge from
the ground in the sonnets, upon which we
are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in
the frescos, which, by reason of our own
ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and
we may walk from one side to the other amid
the elemental forces of this same man's
mind.

XXXVIII

Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams,

That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front
Beyond the natural fulness of your wont.

I gave, and I take back as it beseems.

And thou dense choking atmosphere on high
Disperse thy fog of sighs — for it is mine,
And make the glory of the sun to shine

Again on my dim eyes. — O, Earth and Sky

Give me again the footsteps I have trod.

Let the paths grow where I walked them bare,
The echoes where I waked them with my prayer

Be deaf — and let those eyes — those eyes, O God,

Give me the light I lent them. — That some soul

May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it.
163

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

This rough and exceedingly obscure son-
net, in which strong feeling has condensed
and distorted the language, seems to have
been written by a man who has been in love
and has been repulsed. The shock has re-
stored him to a momentary realization of the
whole experience. He looks at the land-
scape, and lo ! the beauty has dropped out of
it. The stream has lost its power, and the
meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped.
His next thought is: "But it is I who had
lent the landscape this beauty. That land-
scape was myself, my dower, my glory, my
birthright," and so he breaks out with " Give
me back the light I threw upon you," and so
on till the bitter word flung to the woman in
the last line. The same clearness of thought
and obscurity of expression and the same pas-
sion is to be found in the famous sonnet —
" Non ha V ottimo artista alcun concetto" —
where he blames himself for not being able to
obtain her good-will — as a bad sculptor who
cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, al-
though he feels it to be there ; and in that
heart-breaking one where he says that people
may only draw from life what they give to
it, and says no good can come to a man who,
looking on such great beauty, feels such pain.

It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for
164

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

the comprehension of the poems, to decide
to whom or at what period each one was
written. There is dispute about some of
them as to whether they were addressed to
men or women. There is question as to
others whether they are prayers addressed
to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria.
In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo
did not himself know which they were.

Vittoria used to instruct him in religion,
and he seems to have felt for her a love so
deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touch-
ing that the words are alive in which he
mentions her.

"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet
which he sent her, evidently in return for
some of her own religious poems, " I wished,
before taking the things that you had many
times deigned to give me, in order that I
might receive them the less unworthily, to
make something for you from my own hand.
But then, remembering and knowing that the
grace of God may not be bought, and that
to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I
confess my fault, and willingly receive the
said things, and when they shall arrive, not
because they are in my house, but I myself
as being in a house of theirs, shall deem
myself in Paradise."

16S

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

We must not forget that at this time

Michael Angelo was an old man, that he

carried about with him a freshness and vigor

of feeling that most people lose with their

youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose

within him at a time when it caused his

hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and

reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope

with it. A mystery play was enacted in

him, — each sonnet is a scene. There is the

whole of a man in each of many of these

sonnets. They do not seem so much like

poems as like microcosms. They are ele-

^ mentally comp!ete. The soul of man could

I be evolved again from them if the formula

were lost.

I know not if it be the longed for light
Of its creator which the soul perceives,
Or if in people's memory there lives

A touch of early grace that keeps them bright

Or else ambition, — or some dream whose might
Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives
And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves —

That tears are welling in me as I write.

The things I feel, the things I follow and the things
I seek — are not in me, — I hardly know the place
To find them. It is others make them mine.
It happens when I see thee — and it brings

Sweet pain — a yes, — a no, — sorrow and grace

Surely it must have been those eyes of thine.

166

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

There are others which give a most touch-
ing picture of extreme piety in extreme old
age. And there are still others which are
both love poems and religious poems at the
same time.

Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know
How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near.
Thou knowest, I know thou knowest — I am here.

Would we had given our greetings long ago.

If true the hope thou hast to me revealed,
If true the plighting of a sacred troth,
Let the wall fall that stands between us both,

For griefs are doubled when they are concealed.

If, loved one, — if I only loved in thee
What thou thyself dost love, — 't is to this end
The spirit with his beloved is allied.

The things thy face inspires and teaches me
Mortality doth little comprehend.
Before we understand we must have died.

Give me the time when loose the reins I flung

Upon the neck of galloping desire.
Give me the angel face that now among

The angels, — tempers Heaven with its fire.
Give the quick step that now is grown so old,

The ready tears — the blaze at thy behest,
If thou dost seek indeed, O Love ! to hold

Again thy reign of terror in my breast.
If it be true that thou dost only live

Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man
167

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Surely a weak old man small food can give

Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can.
Upon life's farthest limit I have stood —
What folly to make fire of burnt wood.

The occasion of the following was prob-
ably some more than wonted favor shown to
him by Vittoria.

XXVI.

Great joy no less than grief doth murder men.
The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed
If, while through every vein with fear he 's chilled,

Sudden reprieve do set him free again.

Thus hath this bourty from you in my pain
Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled,
Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled,

And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain.

Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death.
The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife,
Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift.
Let thy great beauty which God cherisheth
Limit my joy if it desire my life —
The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift.

XXVIII

The heart is not the life of love like mine.
The love I love thee with has none of it.
For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline
And for love's habitation are unfit.
God, when our souls were parted from Him, made
Of me an eye — of thee, splendor and light.
168

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Even in the parts of thee which are to fade

Thou hast the glory ; I have only sight.

Fire from its heat you may not analyze,

Nor worship from eternal beauty take,

Which deifies the lover as he bows.

Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes

Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake

My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows.

The German musicians of the seventeenth
century used to write voluntaries for the
organ, using the shorthand of the older nota-
tion ; they jotted down the formulas of the
successive harmonies expressed in terms of
the chords merely. The transitions and the
musical explanation were left to the indi-
vidual performer. And Michael Angelo has
left behind him, as it were, the poetical
equivalents of such shorthand musical for-
mulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The
successions show a great grasp of compre-
hension, but you cannot play them without
filling them out.

"Is that music, after all," one may ask,
"which leaves so much to the performer,
and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so
much to the reader? " It seems you must be
a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante
of some sort, before you can transpose and
illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some
truth in this criticism, and the modesty of
169

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

purpose in the poems is the only answer to
it. They claim no comment. Comment
claims them. Call them not poetry if you
will. They are a window which looks in
upon the most extraordinary nature of modern
times, — a nature whose susceptibility to
impressions of form through the eye allies
it to classical times; a nature which on the
emotional side belongs to our own day.

Is it a wonder that this man was venerated
with an almost superstitious regard in Italy,
and in the sixteenth century? His creations
were touched with a superhuman beauty
which his contemporaries felt, yet charged
with a profoundly human meaning which
they could not fathom. No one epoch has
held the key to him. There lives not a man
and there never has lived a man who could
say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's
works." It will be said that the same is
true of all the very greatest artists, and so it
is in a measure. But as to the others, that
truth comes as an afterthought and an admis-
sion. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary
and overwhelming impression. " We are not
sure that we comprehend him," say the cen-
turies as they pass, " but of this we are sure :
Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai. "

170

THE FOURTH CANTO OF
THE INFERNO

There are many great works of fiction where
the interest lies in the situation and develop-
ment of the characters or in the wrought-up
climax of the action, and where it is necessary
to read the whole work before one can feel
the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's
poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held
together only by the slender thread of the
itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a
line or two to a page or two ; and the power
of them comes, one may say, not at all from
their connection with each other, but entirely
from the language in which they are given.

A work of this kind is hard to translate
because verbal felicities, to use a mild term,
are untranslatable. What English words can
render the mystery of that unknown voice
that calls out of the deep, —

" Onorate ?1 altissimo poeta,
Torna sua ombra che era dipartita " ?

The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful
greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves
173

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now
to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes
in the cadence of the words themselves. And
so with many of the most splendid lines in
Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian
words. They alone shine with the idea.
They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.

Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most
foreign to the genius of the English race.
From the point of view of English-speaking
people, he is lacking in humor. It might
seem at first blush as if the argument of his
poem were a sufficient warrant for serious-
ness ; but his seriousness is of a nature strange
to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt
and sallow earnestness which appears to us
inhuman.

In the treatment of the supernatural the
Teutonic nations have generally preserved a
touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true
to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor
seems to go with and to heighten the terror of
the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene
on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost
as "old mole," uold truepenny," etc., we
may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excite-
ment and apprehension. Perhaps the expla-
nation of this mixture of humor and terror,
is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its
i74

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

foundations by the immediate presence of the
supernatural, — palsied, as it were, with fear, —
there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote
to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of
levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind
opposes it with the homely and the familiar.
The northern nations were too much afraid of
ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of
one made a man afraid he should lose his
wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it
has come about that in the sincerest terror of
the north there is a touch of grotesque humor ;
and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred
cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single
scene of comedy. The strain of exalted
tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests
and wit are not of the laughing kind. Some-
times they are grim and terrible, sometimes
playful, but always serious and full of meaning.
This lack of humor becomes very palpable
in a translation, where it is not disguised by
the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.

There is another difficulty peculiar to the
translating of Dante into English. English is
essentially a diffuse and prodigal language.
The great English writers have written with a
free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shake-
speare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott*
Robert Browning, all the typical writers of
x75

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

English, have been many-worded. They have
been men who said everything that came into
their heads, and trusted to their genius to
make their writings readable. The eighteenth
century in England, with all its striving after
classical precision, has left behind it no great
laconic English classic who stands in the first
rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough,
but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante
is not only concise, but logical, deductive,
prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing
that he had not thought of a thousand times,
and conned over, arranged, and digested. We
have in English no prototype for such con-
densation. There is no native work in the
language written in anything which approaches
the style of Dante.

My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke,
So that I shook myself, springing upright,
Like one awakened by a sudden stroke,
And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight
Slowly about me, — awful privilege, —
To know the place that held me, if I might.
In truth I found myself upon the edge
That girds the valley of the dreadful pit,
Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge.
Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it
Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low,
It helped my vain conjecture not- a whit.
" Let us go down to the blind world below,"
Began the poet, with a face like death,
176

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

" I shall go first, thou second." " Say not so,"
Cried I when I again could find my breath,
For I had seen the whiteness of his face,
" How shall I come if thee it frighteneth ? "
And he replied : " The anguish of the place
And those that dwell there thus hath painted me
With pity, not with fear. But come apace ;
The spur of the journey pricks us." Thus did he
Enter himself, and take me in with him,
Into the first great circle's mystery
That winds the deep abyss about the brim.

Here there came borne upon the winds to us,
Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim,
And kept the eternal breezes tremulous.
The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain,
That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus.
I saw great crowds of children, women, men,
Wheeling below. " Thou dost not seek to know
What spirits are these thou seest? " Thus again
My master spoke. " But ere we further go,
Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight
Of sin. They well deserved, — and yet not so. —
They had not baptism, which is the gate
Of Faith, — thou holdest. If they lived before
The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state
God they might never worthily adore.
And I myself am such an one as these.
For this shortcoming — on no other score —
We are lost, and most of all our torment is
That lost to hope we live in strong desire."
Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his,
Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire
I recognized, hung in that Limbo there.

12 I77

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

" Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire,"
Cried I at last, with eager hope to share
That all-convincing faith, — " but went there not
One, — once, — from hence, — made happy though it

were
Through his own merit or another's lot ? "
" I was new come into this place," said he,
Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought,
" When Him whose brows were bound with Victory
I saw come conquering through this prison dark.
He set the shade of our first parent free,
With Abel, and the builder of the ark,
And him that gave the laws immutable,
And Abraham, obedient patriarch,
David the king, and ancient Israel,
His father and his children at his side,
And the wife Rachel that he loved so well,
And gave them Paradise, — and before these men
None tasted of salvation that have died."

We did not pause while he was talking then,
But held our constant course along the track,
Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen.
And we had reached a point whence to turn back
Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear,
Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black,
Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere.
The place was distant still, but I could see
Clustered about the fire, as we drew near,
Figures of an austere nobility.
" Thou who dost honor science and love art,
Pray who are these, whose potent dignity
Doth eminently set them thus apart? "
The poet answered me, " The honored fame
I78

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

That made their lives illustrious touched the heart

Of God to advance them." Then a voice there came,

" Honor the mighty poet ; " and again,

" His shade returns, — do honor to his name."

And when the voice had finished its refrain,

I saw four giant shadows coming on.

They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien.

And my good master said : " See him, my son,

That bears the sword and walks before the rest,

And seems the father of the three, — that one

Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist

Horace comes next ; third, Ovid; and the last

Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed

That each doth share with me ; therefore they haste

To greet and do me honor ; — nor do they wrong."

Thus did I see the assembled school who graced

The master of the most exalted song,

That like an eagle soars above the rest.

When they had talked together, though not long,

They turned to me, nodding as to a guest.

At which my master smiled, but yet more high

They lifted me in honor. At their behest

I went with them as of their company,

And made the sixth among those mighty wits.

Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy
Of things my silence wisely here omits,
As there 't was sweet to speak them, till we came
To where a seven times circled castle sits,
Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream.
This we crossed over as it had been dry,
Passing the seven gates that guard the same,
And reached a meadow, green as Arcady.
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FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes
Whose looks were weighted with authority.
Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies.
The walls receding left a pasture fair,
A place all full of light and of great size,
So we could see each spirit that was there.
And straight before my eyes upon the green
Were shown to me the souls of those that were,
Great spirits it exalts me to have seen.
Electra with her comrades I descried,
I saw ^Eneas, and knew Hector keen,
And in full armor Caesar, falcon-eyed,
Camilla and the Amazonian queen,
King Latin with Lavinia at his side,
Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin,
Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia,
And by himself the lonely Saladin.

The Master of all thinkers next I saw
Amid the philosophic family.
All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe ;
Plato and Socrates were next his knee,
Then Heraclitus and Empedocles,
Thales and Anaxagoras, and he
That based the world on chance ; and next to these,
Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech
The herb-collector, Dioscorides.
Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each
Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore,
Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach
Hippocrates and Avicenna's store,
The sage that wrote the master commentary,
Averois, with Galen and a score
Of great physicians. But my pen were weary
Depicting all of that majestic plain
Splendid with many an antique dignitary.
180

FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO

My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain
To give the thought the thing itself conveys.
The six of us were now cut down to twain.
My guardian led me forth by other ways,
Far from the quiet of that trembling wind,
And from the gentle shining of those rays,
To places where all light was left behind.

181

ROBERT BROWNING

THERE is a period in the advance of any great
man's influence between the moment when he
appears and the moment when he has be-
come historical, during which it is difficult
to give any succinct account of him. We
are ourselves a part of the . thing we would
describe. The element which we attempt to
isolate for purposes of study is still living
within us. Our science becomes tinged with
autobiography. Such must be the fate of
any essay on Browning written at the present
time.

The generation to whom his works were
unmeaning has hardly passed away. The
generation he spoke for still lives. His in-
fluence seems still to be expanding. The
literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase-
books, treatises, and philosophical studies
grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to
Browning (1893) gives a condensed cata-
logue of the best books and essays on Brown-
ing, which covers many finely printed pages.
This class of book — the text-book — is not
185

ROBERT BROWNING

the product of impulse. The text-book is a
commercial article and follows the demand
as closely as the reaper follows the crop.
We can tell the acreage under cultivation by
looking over the account books of the makers
of farm implements. Thousands of people
are now studying Browning, following in his
footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and
hunting up the subjects he treated.

This Browningism which we are disposed
to laugh at is a most interesting secondary
outcome of his influence. It has its roots
in natural piety, and the educational value
of it is very great.

Browning's individuality created for him a
personal following, and he was able to re-
spond to the call to leadership. Unlike
Carlyle, he had something to give his disci-
ples beside the immediate satisfaction of a
spiritual need. He gave them not only meal
but seed. In this he was like Emerson;
but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of
a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage
and saw the stars over his head through his
skylight. Browning, on the other hand,
loved pictures, places, music, men and
women, and his works are like the house of
a rich man, — a treasury of plunder from
many provinces and many ages, whose man-
186

ROBERT BROWNING

ners and passions are vividly recalled to us.
In Emerson's house there was not a peg to
hang a note upon, — " this is his bookshelf,
this his bed." But Browning's palace craves
a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to
such a palace becomes a liberal education.

Robert Browning was a strong, glowing,
whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life
more intensely than any Englishman since
Walter Scott. He was born among books;
and circumstances enabled him to follow his
inclinations and become a writer, — a poet by
profession. He was, from early youth to
venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality,
the very embodiment of spontaneous life;
and the forms of poetry in which he so fully
and so accurately expressed himself enable
us to know him well. Indeed, only great
poets are known so intimately as we know
Robert Browning.

Religion was at the basis of his character,
and it was the function of religious poetry
that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man
invents his own theology, but takes it from
the current world and moulds it to his needs,
it was inevitable that Robert Browning should
find and seize upon as his own all that was
optimistic in Christian theology. Everything
that was hopeful his spirit accepted; every-
187

ROBERT BROWNING

thing that was sunny and joyful and good for
the brave soul he embraced. What was dis-
tressing he rejected or explained away. In
the world of Robert Browning everything was
| right.

The range of subject covered by his poems
is wider than that of any other poet that ever
lived ; but the range of his ideas is exceed-
ingly small. We need not apologize for

^ treating Browning as a theologian and a

doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life
in trying to show that a poet is always really
both — and he has almost convinced us.

\ The expositors and writers of text-books have

had no difficulty in formulating his theology,
for it is of the simplest kind ; and his views
on morality and art are logically a part of it.
The " message " which poets are convention-
ally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's
case, a very definite creed, which may be
found fully set forth in any one of twenty
poems. Every line of his poetry is logically
dedicated to it.

He believes that the development of the
individual soul is the main end of existence.
The strain and stress of life are incidental to
growth, and therefore desirable. Develop-
ment and growth mean a closer union with
God. In fact, God is of not so much import-
188

ROBERT BROWNING

ance in Himself, but as the end towards
which man tends. That irreverent person
who said that Browning uses " God " as a
pigment made an accurate criticism of his
theology. In Browning, God is adjective to
man. Browning believes that all conven-
tional morality must be reviewed from the
standpoint of how conduct affects the actor
himself, and what effect it has on his individ-
ual growth. The province of art and of all
thinking and working is to make these truths
clear and to grapple with the problems they
give rise to.

The first two fundamental beliefs of Brown-
ing— namely: (i) that, ultimately speaking,
the most important matter in the world is
the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of
effort is coincident with development — are
probably true. We instinctively feel them to
be true, and they seem to be receiving support
from those quarters of research to which we
look for light, however dim. In the applica-
tion of his dogmas to specific cases in the
field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclu-
sions which are fair subjects for disagreement.
Since most of our conventional morality is
framed to repress the individual, he finds him-
self at war with it — in revolt against it. He
is habitually pitted against it, and thus ac-

ROBERT BROWNING

quires modes of thought which sometimes
lead him into paradox — at least, to conclu-
sions at odds with his premises. It is in the
course of exposition, and incidentally to his
main purpose as a teacher of a few funda-
mental ideas, that Browning has created his
masterpieces of poetry.

Never was there a man who in the course
of a long life changed less. What as a boy
he dreamed of doing, that he did. The
thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts
of his latest. His tales, his songs, his mono-
logues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his
rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme :
whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs.
His interest in the world was solely an inter-
est in them. He saw them in history and in
music; his travels and studies brought him
back nothing else but proofs of them ; the
universe in each of its manifestations was a
commentary upon them. His nature was
the simplest, the most positive, the least
given to abstract speculation, which England
can show in his time. He was not a thinker,
for he was never in doubt. He had recourse
to disputation as a means of inculcating truth,
but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case.
His conclusions are. fixed from the start.
Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as
190

ROBERT BROWNING

absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for
one instant undergone the experience of doubt,
and only knows that there is such a thing
because he has met with it in other people.
The force of his feelings is so much greater
than his intellect that his mind serves his
soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos
he takes what belongs to him and sustains
him, leaving the rest, or not noting it.

There never was a great poet whose scope
was so definite. That is the reason why the
world is so cleanly divided into people who do
and who do not care for Browning. One real
glimpse into him gives you the whole of him.
The public which loves him is made up of
people who have been through certain spiritual
experiences to which he is the antidote. The
public which loves him not consists of people
who have escaped these experiences. To some
he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which
nothing else will replace. To others, who do
not need him, he is a boisterous and eccen-
tric person, — a Heracles in the house of
mourning.

Let us remember his main belief, — the
value of the individual. The needs of society
constantly require that the individual be sup-
pressed. They hold him down and punish
him at every point. The tyranny of order
191

ROBERT BROWNING

and organization — of monarch or public
opinion — weights him and presses him down.
This is the inevitable tendency of all stable
social arrangements. Now and again there
arises some strong nature that revolts against
the influence of conformity which is becoming
intolerable, — against the atmosphere of caste
or theory ; of Egyptian priest or Manchester
economist ; of absolutism or of democracy.

\ And this strong nature cries out that the

souls of men are being injured, and that they
are important; that your soul and my soul
are more important than Caesar — or than
the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the

j\ voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the

world bring always a like message of revolt :
they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need
of the world.

Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning,
were prophets to a generation oppressed in
spirit, whose education had oppressed them
with a Jewish law of Adam Smith and Jeremy
Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and Cob-
den, — of thought for the million, and for man
in the aggregate. " To what end is all this
beneficence, all this conscience, all this
theory? " some one at length cries out. " For
whom is it in the last analysis that you legis-
late ? You talk of man, I see only men."
192

ROBERT BROWNING

To men suffering from an age of devotion
to humanity came Robert Browning as a lib-
erator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first
in this country because we had begun earlier
with our theoretical and practical philanthro-
pies, and had taken them more seriously.
We had suffered more. We needed to be
told that it was right to love, hate, and be
angry, to sin and repent. It was a revelation
to us to think that we had some inheritance
in the joys and passions of mankind. We
needed to be told these things as a tired child
needs to be comforted. Browning gave them
to us in the form of a religion. There was no
one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough
to know what we lacked.

If ever a generation had need of a poet, —
of some one to tell them they might cry and
not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the rea-
son in John Stuart Mill; some one who
should justify the claims of the spirit which
was starving on the religion of humanity, — it
was the generation for whom Browning wrote.

Carlyle had seized upon the French Revo-
lution, which served his ends because it was
filled with striking, with powerful, with gro-
tesque examples of individual force. In his
Hero Worship he gives his countrymen a
philosophy of history based on nothing but
13 193

ROBERT BROWNING

worship of the individual. Browning with the
same end in view gave us pictures of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries in France and
Italy. He glorified what we had thought
crime and error, and made men of us. He
was the apostle to the educated of a most
complex period, but such as he was, he was
complete. Those people to whom he has
been a poet know what it is for the heart to
receive full expression from the lips of an-
other.

The second thesis which Browning insists
on — the identity of spiritual suffering with
spiritual growth — is the one balm of the
world. It is said that recent physiological
experiment shows that muscles do not de-
velop unless exercised up to what is called
the " distress point." If this shall prove to
be an instance of a general law, — if the strug-
gles and agony of the spirit are really signs
of an increase of that spiritual life which is
the only sort of life we can conceive of now or
hereafter, — then the truth-to-feeling of much
of Browning's poetry has a scientific basis.
It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly
two of the most moving and far-reaching
ideas of the world, and he expanded them in
the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole
world of poetic disquisition.
194

ROBERT BROWNING

It is unnecessary at this day to point out
the beauties of Browning or the sagacity with
which he chose his effects. He gives us the
sallow wife of James Lee, whose soul is known
to him, Pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men
found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten,
or misunderstood. He searches the world
till he finds the man whom everybody will
concur in despising, the mediaeval gramma-
rian, and he writes to him the most powerful
ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever
paid to a man. His culture and his learning
are all subdued to what he works in; they
are all in harness to draw his thought. He
mines in antiquity or drags his net over Ger-
man philosophy or modern drawing-rooms, —
all to the same end.

In that miracle of power and beauty —
The Flight of the Duchess — he has im-
provised a whole civilization in order to make
the setting of contrast which shall cause the
soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In
Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch
of romance and mysticism, because he re-
quires it as a stage property. In A Death
in the Desert you have the East in the first
century — so vividly given that you wish in-
stantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel
the atmosphere with which your Bible ought
195

ROBERT BROWNING

always to have been filled. His reading
brings him to Euripides. He sees that Al-
cestis can be set to his theme; and with a
week or two of labor, while staying in a
country house, he draws out of the Greek
fable the world of his own meaning and shows
it shining forth in a living picture of the Greek
theatre which has no counterpart for vitality
in any modern tongue.

The descriptive and narrative powers of
Browning are above, beyond, and outside of
all that has been done in English in our time,
as the odd moments prove which he gave to
the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to
Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These
chips from his workshop passed instantly into
popular favor because they were written in
familiar forms.

How powerfully his gifts of utterance were
brought to bear upon the souls of men will
be recorded, even if never understood, by
literary historians. It is idle to look to the
present generation for an intelligible account
of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Pros-
pice, Saul, The Blot on the 'Scutcheon.
They must be judged by the future and by
men who can speak of them with a steady

up.

It must be conceded that the conventional
196

ROBERT BROWNING

judgments of society are sometimes right,
and Browning's mission led him occasion-
ally into paradox and jeux dy esprit. Bishop
Blougram is an attempt to discover whether
a good case cannot be made out for the in-
dividual hypocrite. The Statue and the Bust
is frankly a rednctio ad absurdum, and ends
with a query.

There is more serious trouble with others.
The Grammarian's Funeral is false to fact,
and will appear so to posterity. The gram-
marian was not a hero, and our calmer mo-
ments show us that the poem is not a great
ode. It gave certain people the glow of a
great truth, but it remains a paradox and a
piece of exaggeration. The same must be
said of a large part of Browning. The New
Testament is full of such paradoxes of exag-
geration, like the parable of the unjust stew-
ard, the rich man's chance for heaven, the
wedding garment; but in these, the truth is
apparent, — we are not betrayed. In Brown-
ing's paradoxes we are often led on and
involved in an emotion over some situation
which does not honestly call for the emotion.

The most noble quality in Browning is
his temper. He does not proceed, as libera-
tors generally do, by railing and pulling
down. He builds up; he is positive, not
197

ROBERT BROWNING

negative. He is less bitter than Christianity
itself.

While there is no more doubt as to the
permanent value of the content of Browning
than of the value of the spiritual truths of the
New Testament, there is very little likelihood
that his poems will be understood in the re-
mote future. At present, they are following
the waves of influence of the education which
they correct. They are built like Palladio's
Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective
converges toward a single seat. In order to
be subject to the illusion, the spectator must
occupy the duke's place. The colors are
dropping from the poems already. The fee-
blest of them lose it first. There was a steady
falling off in power accompanied by a con-
stant increase in his peculiarities during the
last twenty years of his life, and we may
make some surmise as to how Balaustion's
Adventure will strike posterity by reading
Parleyings with Certain People.

The distinctions between Browning's char-
acters — which to us are so vivid — will to
others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi
Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Capon-
sacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be
run in the same mould. They will seem to be
the thinnest disguises which a poet ever as-
ig8

ROBERT BROWNING

sumed. The lack of the dramatic element in
Browning — a lack which is concealed from
us by our intense sympathy for him and by his
fondness for the trappings of the drama — will
be apparent to the after-comers. They will
say that all the characters in The Blot on
the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same
view of the catastrophe of the play; that
Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same
person in the same state of mind. In fact,
the family likeness is great. They will say
that the philosophic monologues are repeti-
tions of each other. It cannot be denied
that there is much repetition, — much thresh-
ing out of old straw. Those who have read
Browning for years and are used to the mon-
ologues are better pleased to find the old
ideas than new ones, which they could not
understand so readily. When the later
Browning takes us on one of those long
afternoon rambles through his mind, — over
moor and fen, through jungle, down preci-
pice, past cataract, — we know just where we
are coming out in the end. We know the
place better than he did himself. Nor will
posterity like Browning's manners, — the dig
in the ribs, the personal application, and
de te fabula of most of his talking. These
unpleasant things are part of his success with
199

ROBERT BROWNING

us to whom he means life, not art. Posterity
will want only art. We needed doctrine. If
he had not preached, we would not have lis-
tened to him. But posterity evades the
preachers and accepts only singers. Pos-
terity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but
choice morsels. It will cull such out of the
body of Browning as the anthologists are
beginning to do already, and will leave the
great mass of him to be rediscovered from
time to time by belated sufferers from the
philosophy of the nineteenth century.

There is a class of persons who claim for
Browning that his verse is really good verse,
and that he was a master of euphony. This
cannot be admitted except as to particular
instances in which his success is due to his
conformity to law, not to his violation of it.

The rules of verse in English are merely a
body of custom which has grown up uncon-
sciously, and most of which rests upon some
simple requirement of the ear.

In speaking of the power of poetry we are
dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the
outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and
complex forces.

The rhythm of versification seems to serve
the purpose of a prompter. It lets us know in

200

ROBERT BROWNING

advance just what syllables are to receive the
emphasis which shall make the sense clear.
There are many lines in poetry which become
obscure the instant they are written in prose,
and probably the advantages of poetry over
prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse
for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates
the comprehension of the matter. Rhyme is
itself an indication that a turning-point has
been reached. It punctuates and sets off the
sense, and relieves our attention from the
strain of suspended interest. All of the arti-
fices of poetical form seem designed to a like
end. Naturalness of speech is somewhat sacri-
ficed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uni-
formity of speech which rests and exhilarates.
We need not, for the present, examine the
question of euphony any further, nor ask
whether euphony be not a positive element
in verse, — an element which belongs to
music.

The negative advantages of poetry over
prose are probably sufficient to account for
most of its power. A few more considerations
of the same negative nature, and which affect
the vividness of either prose or verse, may be
touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry,
why Browning is hard to understand and why
his verse is bad.

201

ROBERT BROWNING

Every one is more at ease in his mind when
he reads a language which observes the ordi-
nary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of
sentences having subjects and predicates, and
of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily
into place. A doubt about the grammar is a
doubt about the sense. And this is so true
that sometimes when our fears are allayed
by faultless grammar we may read absolute
nonsense with satisfaction. We sometimes

i hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry

is likely to endure just in proportion as the

j form of it is superior to the content. As to

the " inferiority " of the content, a moment's
reflection shows that the ideas and feelings
which prevail from age to age, and in which
we may expect posterity to delight, are in
their nature, and of necessity, commonplace.
And if by " superiority of form " it is meant
that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing
metres, — in words which are easy to pro-
nounce, put together according to the rules
of grammar, and largely drawn from the vul-
gar tongue, — we need not wonder that pos-
terity should enjoy it. In fact, it is just such
verse as this which survives from age to age.

Browning possesses one superlative excel-
lence, and it is upon this that he relies. It is
upon this that he has emerged and attacked

202

ROBERT BROWNING

the heart of man. It is upon this that he
may possibly fight his way down to posterity
and live like a fire forever in the bosom of
mankind.

His language is the language of common
speech ; his force, the immediate force of life.
His language makes no compromises of any
sort. It is not subdued to form. The em-
phasis demanded by the sense is very often
not the emphasis demanded by the metre.
He cuts off his words and forces them ruth-
lessly into lines as a giant might force his
limbs into the armor of a mortal. The joints
and members of the speech fall in the wrong
places and have no relation to the joints and
members of the metre.

He writes like a lion devouring an antelope.
He rends his subject, breaks its bones, and
tears out the heart of it. He is not made
more, but less, comprehensible by the verse-
forms in which he writes. The sign-posts of
the metre lead us astray. He would be easier
to understand if his poems were printed in
the form of prose. That is the reason why
Browning becomes easy when read aloud;
for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of
speech, and throw over all effort to follow the
emphasis of the metre. This is also the reason
why Browning is so unquotable — why he has
203

ROBERT BROWNING

made so little effect upon the language — why
so few of the phrases and turns of thought
and metaphor with which poets enrich a lan-
guage have been thrown into English by him.
Let a man who does not read poetry take up
a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will
find page after page of lines and phrases
which he knows by heart — from Tennyson,
Milton, Wordsworth — things made familiar
to him not by the poets, but by the men
whom the poets educated, and who adopted
their speech. Of Browning he will know not
a word. And yet Browning's poetry is full of
words that glow and smite, and which have
been burnt into and struck into the most influ-
ential minds of the last fifty years.

But Browning's phrases are almost impos-
sible to remember, because they are speech
not reduced to poetry. They do not sing,
they do not carry. They have no artificial
buoys to float them in our memories.

It follows from this uncompromising nature
of Browning that when, by the grace of inspi-
ration, the accents of his speech do fall into
rhythm, his words will have unimaginable
sweetness. The music is so much a part of the
words — so truly spontaneous — that other
verse seems tame and manufactured beside his.

Rhyme is generally so used by Browning
204

ROBERT BROWNING

as not to subserve the true function of rhyme.
It is forced into a sort of superficial confor-
mity, but marks no epoch in the verse. The
clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye
and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming
leads Browning into inversions, — into expan-
sions of sentences beyond the natural close of
the form, — into every sort of contortion.
The rhymes clog and distress the sentences.

As to grammar, Browning is negligent.
Some of his most eloquent and wonderful pas-
sages have no grammar whatever. In Sor-
dello grammar does not exist ; and the want
of it, the strain upon the mind caused by
an effort to make coherent sentences out of a
fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of
talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of
course no one but a school-master desires
that poetry shall be capable of being parsed ;
but every one has a right to expect that he
shall be left without a sense of grammatical
deficiency.

The Invocation in The Ring and the
Book is one of the most beautiful openings
that can be imagined.

" O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire —
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
205

ROBERT BROWNING

And sang a kindred soul out to his face —

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart —

When the first summons from the darkling earth

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,

And bared them of the glory — to drop down,

To toil for man, to suffer or to die —

This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ?

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help !

Never may I commence my song, my due

To God who best taught song by gift of thee,

Except with bent head and beseeching hand —

That still, despite the distance and the dark

What was, again may be ; some interchange

Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,

Some benediction anciently thy smile ; —

Never conclude, but raising hand and head

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn

For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,

Their utmost up and on — so blessing back

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,

Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes

proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall."

These sublime lines are marred by appar-
ent grammatical obscurity. The face of
beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems
sightless. We re-read the lines to see if we
are mistaken. If they were in a foreign
language, we should say we did not fully
understand them.

In the dramatic monologues, as, for in-
stance, in The Ring and the Book and in the
206

ROBERT BROWNING

innumerable other narratives and contempla-
tions where a single speaker holds forth, we
are especially called upon to forget grammar.
The speaker relates and reflects, — pours out
his ideas in the order in which they occur to
him, — pursues two or three trains of thought
at the same time, claims every license which
either poetry or conversation could accord
him. The effect of this method is so start-
ling, that when we are vigorous enough to
follow the sense, we forgive all faults of metre
and grammar, and feel that this natural Niag-
ara of speech is the only way for the turbulent
mind of man to get complete utterance. We
forget that it is possible for the same thing to
be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled,
and charmed into music.

Prospero is as natural and as individual as
Bishop Blougram. His grammar is as incom-
plete, yet we do not note it. He talks to
himself, to Miranda, to Ariel, all at once,
weaving all together his passions, his philoso-
phy, his narrative, and his commands. His
reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical
as anything in Browning, and yet all is clear,
— all is so managed that it lends magic. The
characteristic and unfathomable significance
of this particular character Prospero comes
out of it.

207

M .

ROBERT BROWNING

" Prospero. My brother and thy uncle, called
Antonio —
I pray thee mark me, — that a brother should
Be so perfidious ! — he whom next thyself,
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state ; as at that time
Through all the seignories it was the first,
And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed
In dignity and for the liberal arts,
Without a parallel : those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle —
Dost thou attend me ? "

It is unnecessary to give examples from
Browning of defective verse, of passages
which cannot be understood, which cannot
be construed, which cannot be parodied, and
which can scarcely be pronounced. They
are mentioned only as throwing light on
Browning's cast of mind and methods of
work. His inability to recast and correct his
work cost the world a master. He seems to
have been condemned to create at white heat
and to stand before the astonishing draft,
which his energy had flung out, powerless to
complete it.

We have a few examples of things which

came forth perfect, but many of even the

most beautiful and most original of the shorter

poems are marred by some blotches that hurt

208

ROBERT BROWNING

us and which one feels might have been struck
out or corrected in half an hour. How many
of the poems are too long ! It is not that
Browning went on writing after he had com-
pleted his thought, — for the burst of beauty
is as likely to come at the end as at the
beginning, — but that his thought had to
unwind itself like web from a spider. He
could not command it. He could only un-
wind and unwind.

Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous
as a Correggio, but not finished. Caliban
upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows crea-
tive genius, beyond all modern reach, but
flounders and drags on too long. In the
poems which he revised, as, for instance, Herve
Riel, which exists in two or more forms, the
corrections are verbal, and were evidently
done with the same fierce haste with which
the poems were written.

We must not for an instant imagine that
Browning was indolent or indifferent; it is
known that he was a taskmaster to himself.
But he could not write other than he did.
When the music came and the verse caught
the flame, and his words became sweeter, and
his thought clearer, then he could sweep
down like an archangel bringing new strains
of beauty to the earth. But the occasions
14 209

ROBERT BROWNING

when he did this are a handful of passages in
a body of writing as large as the Bible.

Just as Browning could not stop, so he
found it hard to begin. His way of beginning
is to seize the end of the thread just where he
can, and write down the first sentence.

" She should never have looked at me,
If she meant I should not love her ! "

" Water your damned flowerpots, do — "

" No ! for I '11 save it ! Seven years since."

" But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow ! "

" Fear Death ? to feel the fog in my throat."

Sometimes his verse fell into coils as it
came, but he himself, as he wrote the first
line of a poem, never knew in what form of
verse the poem would come forth. Hence
the novel figures and strange counterpoint.
Having evolved the first group of lines at
haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form
(a very complex form, perhaps, which, in
order to have any organic effect, would have
to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and
repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be
judge of his success in these experiments.
Sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt
to trace the logic of the rhymes which are
210

ROBERT BROWNING

concealed by the rough jolting of the metre.
Sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the
first verse, but continues in irregular improvi-
sation.

Browning never really stoops to literature ;
he makes perfunctory obeisance to it. The
truth is that Browning is expressed by his
defects. He would not be Robert Browning
without them. In the technical part of his
art, as well as in his spirit, Browning repre-
sents a reaction of a violent sort. He was
too great an artist not to feel that his viola-
tions of form helped him. The blemishes in
The Grammarian's Funeral — hotis busi-
ness, the enclitic de — were stimulants; they
heightened his effects. They helped him
make clear his meaning, that life is greater
than art. These savageries spoke to the
hearts of men tired of smoothness and plati-
tude, and who were relieved by just such a
breaking up of the ice. Men loved Browning
not only for what he was, but also for what he
was not.

These blemishes were, under the circum-
stances, and for a limited audience, strokes of
art. It is not to be pretended that, even from
this point of view, they were always success-
ful, only that they are organic. The nine-
teenth century would have to be lived over
211

ROBERT BROWNING

again to wipe these passages out of Browning's
poetry.

In that century he stands as one of the
great men of England. His doctrines are
the mere effulgence of his personality. He
himself was the truth which he taught. His
life was the life of one of his own heroes ; and
in the close of his life — by a coincidence
which is not sad, but full of meaning — may
be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in
which he himself delighted.

Through youth and manhood Browning rose
like a planet calmly following the laws of his
own being. From time to time he put forth
his volumes which the world did not under-
stand. Neglect caused him to suffer, but not
to change. It was not until his work was all
but finished, not till after the publication of
The Ring and the Book, that complete rec-
ognition came to him. It was given him by
men and women who had been in the nursery
when he began writing, who had passed their
youth with his minor poems, and who under-
stood him.

In later life Browning's powers declined.
The torrent of feeling could no longer float
the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly
and for so long. His poems, always difficult,
grew dry as well.

212

ROBERT BROWNING

But Browning was true to himself. He had
all his life loved converse with men and
women, and still enjoyed it. He wrote con-
stantly and to his uttermost. It was not for
him to know that his work was done. He
wrote on manfully to the end, showing,
occasionally, his old power, and always his
old spirit. And on his death-bed it was not
only his doctrine, but his life that blazed out
in the words : —

" One who never turned his back, but marched breast
forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong

would triumph.
Held, we fall to rise — are baffled to fight better —
Sleep to wake."

213

,w4

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

In the early eighties, and in an epoch when
the ideals of George Eliot were still control-
ling, the figure of Stevenson rose with a sort
of radiance as a writer whose sole object was
to entertain. Most of the great novelists
were then dead, and the scientific school was
in the ascendant. Fiction was entering upon
its death grapple with sociology. Stevenson
came, with his tales of adventure and intrigue,
out-of-door life and old-time romance, and he
recalled to every reader his boyhood and the
delights of his earliest reading. We had for-
gotten that novels could be amusing.

Hence it is that the great public not only
loves Stevenson as a writer, but regards him
with a certain personal gratitude. There was,
moreover, in everything he wrote an engaging
humorous touch which made friends for him
everywhere, and excited an interest in his
fragile and somewhat elusive personality sup-
plementary to the appreciation of his books
as literature. Toward the end of his life
217

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

both he and the public discovered this, and
his railleries or sermons took on the form
of personal talk.

Beneath these matters lay the fact, known
to all, that the man was fighting a losing
battle against mortal sickness, and that
practically the whole of his work was done
under conditions which made any produc-
tivity seem a miracle. The heroic invalid
was seen through all his books, still sitting
before his desk or on his bed, turning out
with unabated courage, with increasing ability,
volume after volume of gayety, of boys' story-
book, and of tragic romance.

There is enough in this record to explain
the popularity, running at times into hero-
worship and at times into drawing-room
fatuity, which makes Stevenson and his work
a fair subject for study. It is not impossible
that a man who met certain needs of the
times so fully, and whom large classes of
people sprang forward to welcome, may in
some particulars give a clew to the age.

Any description of Stevenson's books is
unnecessary. We have all read them too
recently to need a prompter. The high
spirits and elfin humor which play about
and support every work justifies them all.
One of his books, The Child's Garden of
218

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Verses, is different in kind from the rest It
has no prototype, and is by far the most
original thing that he did. The unsophisti-
cated and gay little volume is a work of the
greatest value. Stevenson seems to have
remembered the impressions of his childhood
with accuracy, and he has recorded them
without affectation, without sentimentality,
without exaggeration. In depicting children
he draws from life. He is at home in the
mysteries of their play and in the inconse-
quent operations of their minds, in the golden
haze of impressions in which they live. The
references to children in his essays and books
show the same understanding and sympathy.
There is more than mere literary charm in
what he says here. In the matter of child-
hood we must study him with respect. He
is an authority.

The slight but serious studies in biography
— alas ! too few — which Stevenson published,
ought also to be mentioned, because their
merit is apt to be overlooked by the admirers
of his more ambitious works. His under-
standing of two such opposite types of men
as Burns and Thoreau is notable, and no less
notable are the courage, truth, and penetra-
tion with which he dealt with them. His
essay on Burns is the most comprehensible
219

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

word ever said of Burns. It makes us love
Burns less, but understand him more.

The problems suggested by Stevenson are
more important than his work itself. We
have in him that rare combination, — a man
whose theories and whose practice are of a
piece. His doctrines are the mere descrip-
tion of his own state of mind while at
work.

The quality which every one will agree in
conceding to Stevenson is lightness of touch.
This quality is a result of his extreme lucidity,
not only of thought, but of intention. We
know what he means, and we are sure that we
grasp his whole meaning at the first reading.
Whether he be writing a tale of travel or
humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story
of horror, a morality, or a fable ; in whatever
key he plays, — and he seems to have taken
delight in showing mastery in many, — the
reader feels safe in his hands, and knows that
no false note will be struck. His work makes
no demands upon the attention. It is food so
thoroughly peptonized that it is digested as
soon as swallowed and leaves us exhilarated
rather than fed.

Writing was to him an art, and almost
everything that he has written has a little
the air of being a tour de force. Steven-

220

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

son's books and essays were generally bril-
liant imitations of established things, done
somewhat in the spirit of an expert in bil-
liards. In short, Stevenson is the most ex-
traordinary mimic that has ever appeared in
literature.

That is the reason why he has been so
much praised for his style. When we say of
a new thing that it " has style," we mean that
it is done as we have seen things done
before. Bunyan, De Foe, or Charles Lamb
were to their contemporaries men without
style. The English, to this day, complain
of Emerson that he has no style.

If a man writes as he talks, he will be
thought to have no style, until people get
used to him, for literature means what has
been written. As soon as a writer is estab-
lished, his manner of writing is adopted by
the literary conscience of the times, and you
may follow him and still have " style." You
may to-day imitate George Meredith, and
people, without knowing exactly why they do
it, will concede you " style." Style means
tradition.

When Stevenson, writing from Samoa in the

agony of his South Seas (a book he could

not write because he had no paradigm and

original to copy from), says that he longs for

221

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

a " moment of style," he means that he
wishes there would come floating through
his head a memory of some other man's way
of writing to which he could modulate his
sentences.

It is no secret that Stevenson in early life
spent much time in imitating the styles of
various authors, for he has himself described
the manner in which he went to work to fit
himself for his career as a writer. His boyish
ambition led him to employ perfectly phenom-
enal diligence in cultivating a perfectly phe-
nomenal talent for imitation.

There was probably no fault in Stevenson's
theory as to how a man should learn to write,
and as to the discipline he must undergo.
Almost all the greatest artists have shown,
in their early work, traces of their early
masters. These they outgrow. " For as this
temple waxes, the inward service of the mind
and soul grows wide withal ; " and an author's
own style breaks through the coverings of his
education, as a hyacinth breaks from the
bulb. It is noticeable, too, that the early and
imitative work of great men generally belongs
to a particular school to which their maturity
bears a logical relation. They do not cruise
about in search of a style or vehicle, trying
all and picking up hints here and there, but
222

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

they fall incidentally and genuinely under
influences which move them and afterwards
qualify their original work.

With Stevenson it was different; for he
went in search of a style as Ccelebs in search
of a wife. He was an eclectic by nature.
He became a remarkable, if not a unique phe-
nomenon, — for he never grew up. Whether
or not there was some obscure connection
between his bodily troubles and the arrest of
his intellectual development, it is certain that
Stevenson remained a boy till the day of his
death.

The boy was the creature in the universe
whom Stevenson best understood. Let us
remember how a boy feels about art, and why
he feels so. The intellect is developed in the
child with such astonishing rapidity that long
before physical maturity its head is filled
with ten thousand things learned from books
and not drawn directly from real life.

The form and setting in which the boy
learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part
of the matters themselves. He cannot dis-
entangle what is conventional from what is
original, because he has not yet a first-hand
acquaintance with life by which to interpret.

Every schoolboy of talent writes essays
in the style of Addison, because he is taught
223

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

that this is the correct way of writing. He
has no means of knowing that in writing in
this manner he is using his mind in a very
peculiar and artificial way, — a way entirely
foreign to Addison himself; and that he is
really striving not so much to say something
himself as to reproduce an effect.

There is one thing which young people do
not know, and which they find out during the
process of growing up, — and that is that
good things in art have been done by men
whose entire attention was absorbed in an
attempt to tell the truth, and who have
been chiefly marked by a deep unconscious-
ness.

To a boy, the great artists of the world are
a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments
can perhaps be stolen and used again. To a
man, they are a lot of human beings, and their
works are parts of them. Their works are
their hands and their feet, their organs, di-
mensions, senses, affections, passions. To a
man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of
Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imi-
tate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating.
But Stevenson was not a man, he was a
boy ; or, to speak more accurately, the atti-
tude of his mind towards his work remained
unaltered from boyhood till death, though
224

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

his practice and experiment gave him, as he
grew older, a greater mastery over his mate-
rials. It is in this attitude of Stevenson's
mind toward his own work that we must
search for the heart of his mystery.

He conceived of himself as " an artist,"
and of his writings as performances. As a
consequence, there is an undertone of insin-
cerity in almost everything which he has
written. His attention is never wholly ab-
sorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up
with the notion of how each stroke of it is
going to appear.

We have all experienced, while reading his
books, a certain undefinable suspicion which
interferes with the enjoyment of some people,
and enhances that of others. It is not so
much the cream-tarts themselves that we sus-
pect, as the motive of the giver.

" I am in the habit," said Prince Florizel,
" of looking not so much to the nature of the
gift as to the spirit in which it is offered."

" The spirit, sir," returned the young man,
with another bow, " is one of mockery."

This doubt about Stevenson's truth and
candor is one of the results of the artistic
doctrines which he professed and practised.
He himself regards his work as a toy; and
how can we do otherwise?
is 225

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

It seems to be a law of psychology that the
only way in which the truth can be strongly
told is in the course of a search for truth.
The moment a man strives after some " ef-
fect," he disqualifies himself from making
that effect; for he draws the interest of his
audience to the same matters that occupy his
own mind ; namely, upon his experiment and
his efforts. It is only when a man is say-
ing something that he believes is obviously
and eternally true, that he can communicate
spiritual things.

Ultimately speaking, the vice of Steven-
son's theories about art is that they call for a
self-surrender by the artist of his own mind
to the pleasure of others, for a subordination
of himself to the production of this " effect "
in the mind of another. They degrade and
belittle him. Let Stevenson speak for him-
self; the thought contained in the follow-
ing passage is found in a hundred places
in his writings and dominated his artistic
life.

" The French have a romantic evasion for
one employment, and call its practitioners the
Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same
family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his
trade to please himself, gains his livelihood
by pleasing others, and has parted with
226

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

something of the sterner dignity of men.
The poor Daughter of Joy carrying her
smiles and her finery quite unregarded
through the crowd, makes a figure which it
is impossible to recall without a wounding
pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful
artist."

These are the doctrines and beliefs which,
time out of mind, have brought the arts into
contempt. They are as injurious as they are
false, and they will checkmate the progress
of any man or of any people that believes
them. They corrupt and menace not merely
the fine arts, but every other form of human
expression in an equal degree. They are as
insulting to the comic actor as they are to
Michael Angelo, for the truth and beauty of
low comedy are as dignified, and require of
the artist the same primary passion for life
for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of
The Divine Comedy. The doctrines are the
outcome of an Alexandrine age. After art
has once learnt to draw its inspiration directly
from life and has produced some master-
pieces, then imitations begin to creep in.
That Stevenson's doctrines tend to produce
imitative work is obvious. If the artist is a
fisher of men, then we must examine the
works of those who have known how to bait
227

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

their hooks : in fiction, — De Foe, Fielding,
Walter Scott, Dumas, Balzac.

To a study of these men, Stevenson had,
as we have seen, devoted the most plastic
years of his life. The style and even the
mannerisms of each of them, he had trained
himself to reproduce. One can almost write
their names across his pages and assign each
as a presiding genius over a share of his
work. Not that Stevenson purloined or
adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity.
His enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he
did. He was well read in the belles lettres
of England and the romanticists of France.
These books were his bible. He was steeped
in the stage-land and cloud-land of senti-
mental literature. From time to time, he
emerged, trailing clouds of glory and shower-
ing sparkles from his hands.

A close inspection shows his clouds and
sparkles to be stage properties ; but Steven-
son did not know it. The public not only
does not know it, but does not care whether
it be so or not. The doughty old novel
readers who knew their Scott and Ainsworth
and Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, their
Dumas and their Cooper, were the very
people whose hearts were warmed by Stev-
enson. If you cross-question one of these,
228

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

he will admit that Stevenson is after all a
revival, an echo, an after-glow of the roman-
tic movement, and that he brought nothing
new. He will scout any comparison between
Stevenson and his old favorites, but he is
ready enough to take Stevenson for what he
is worth. The most casual reader recognizes
a whole department of Stevenson's work as
competing in a general way with Walter
Scott.

Kidnapped is a romantic fragment whose
original is to be found in the Scotch scenes
of the Waverley Novels. An incident near
the beginning of it, the curse of Jennet
Clouston upon the House of Shaws, is trans-
ferred from Guy Mannering almost literally.
But the curse of Meg Merrilies in Guy Man-
nering— which is one of the most surprising
and powerful scenes Scott ever wrote — is an
organic part of the story, whereas the tran-
script is a thing stuck in for effect, and the
curse is put in the mouth of an old woman
whose connection with the plot is apocryphal,
and who never appears again.

Treasure Island is a piece of astounding
ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from
Robinson Crusoe, and the plot belongs to
the era of the detective story. The Treas-
ure of Franchard is a French farce or light
229

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a
little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic.
The tone, the mise-en-schie> the wit, the char-
acter-drawing, the very language, are all so
marvellously reproduced from the French,
that we almost see the footlights while we
read it.

The Sieur de Maletroit's Door embodies
the same idea as a well-known French play
in verse and in one act. The version of
Stevenson is like an exquisite water-color
copy, almost as good as the original.

The Isle of Voices is the production of a
man of genius. No one can too much admire
the legerdemain of the magician who could
produce this thing ; for it is a story out of
the Arabian Nights, told with a perfection of
mannerism, a reproduction of the English in
which the later translators of the Arabian
Nights have seen fit to deal, a simulation of
the movement and detail of the Eastern stories
which fairly takes our breath away.

It is " ask and have " with this man. Like
Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives
us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an
instance in point. Any one familiar with
MerimeVs stories will smile at the na'fvete
with which Stevenson has taken the lead-
ing idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with
230

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we
have " fables," moralities, and psychology,
Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will O' the
Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style,
in which people say, " Ye can go, boy; for I
will keep your good friend and my good gossip
company till curfew — aye, and by St. Mary till
the Sun get up again." We must have opera
bouffe, as in Prince Otto ; melodrama, as in
The Pavilion on the Links; the essay of
almost biblical solemnity in the manner of
Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming
humor in the style of Charles Lamb, the
essay of introspection and egotism in the
style of Montaigne.

Let us not for a moment imagine that
Stevenson has stolen these things and is try-
ing to palm them off on us as his own. He
has absorbed them. He does not know their
origin. He gives them out again in joy and
in good faith with zest and amusement and
in the excitement of a new discovery.

If all these many echoing voices do not
always ring accurately true, yet their number
is inordinate and remarkable. They will not
bear an immediate comparison with their
originals ; but we may be sure that the vin-
tages of Mephistopheles would not have stood
a comparison with real wine.
231

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

One of the books which established Steven-
son's fame was the New Arabian Nights.
The series of tales about Prince Florizel of
Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and alto-
gether delightful departure in light literature.
The stories are a frank and wholesome cari-
cature of the French detective story. They
are legitimate pieces of literature because
they are burlesque, and because the smiling
Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the
pages of Stevenson is for this time the
acknowledged showman of the piece.

A burlesque is always an imitation shown
off by the foil of some incongruous setting.
The setting in this case Stevenson found
about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the
railways of sordid and complicated London.

In this early book Stevenson seems to have
stumbled upon the true employment of his
powers without realizing the treasure trove,
for he hardly returned to the field of humor,
for which his gifts most happily fitted him.
As a writer of burlesque he truly expresses
himself. He is full of genuine fun.

The fantastic is half brother to the bur-
lesque. Each implies some original as a point
of departure, and as a scheme for treatment
some framework upon which the author's wit
and fancy shall be lavished.
232

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

It is in the region of the fantastic that
Stevenson loved to wander, and it is in this
direction that he expended his marvellous
ingenuity. His fairy tales and arabesques
must be read as they were written, in the
humor of forty fancies and without any heavy-
fisted intention of getting new ideas about
life. It will be said that the defect of Steven-
son is expressed by these very qualities, fancy
and ingenuity, because they are contradictory,
and the second destroys the first. Be this as
it may, there are many people whose pleasure
is not spoiled by elaboration and filigree
work.

Our ability to follow Stevenson in his fan-
tasias depends very largely upon how far our
imaginations and our sentimental interests are
dissociated from our interest in real life.
Commonplace and common-sense people,
whose emotional natures are not strongly at
play in the conduct of their daily lives, have
a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a
very low degree of energy, which delights to
be occupied with the unreal and the impos-
sible. More than this, any mind which is
daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some
of the true relations governing things as they
are, finds its natural relaxation in the contem-
plation of things as they are not, — things as
233

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

they cannot be. There is probably no one
who will not find himself thoroughly enjoy-
ing the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued
enough. Hence the justification of a whole
branch of Stevenson's work.

After every detraction has been allowed for,
there remain certain books of Stevenson's of
an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books
which can hardly be classed as imitations or
arabesques, — Kidnapped, Weir of Hermis-
ton, The Merry Men. These books seem
at first blush to have every element of great-
ness, except spontaneity. The only trouble
is, they are too perfect.

If, after finishing Kidnapped, or The
Merry Men, we take up Guy Mannering,
or The Antiquary, or any of Scott's books
which treat of the peasantry, the first im-
pression we gain is, that we are happy.
The tension is gone ; we are in contact with
a great, sunny, benign human being who
pours a flood of life out before us and floats
us as the sea floats a chip. He is full of old-
fashioned and absurd passages. Sometimes
he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed.
He is so careless of his English that his sen-
tences are not always grammatical; but we
get a total impression of glorious and whole-
some life.

234

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

It is the man Walter Scott who thus ex-
cites us. This heather, these hills, these
peasants, this prodigality and vigor and
broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. If
we return now to Weir of Hermiston, we
seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist
All is intention, all calculation. The very-
style of Weir of Hermiston is English ten
times distilled.

Let us imagine that directness and uncon-
sciousness are the great qualities of style,
and that Stevenson believes this. The great-
est directness and unconsciousness of which
Stevenson himself was capable are to be
found in some of his early writings. Across
the Plains, for instance, represents his most
straightforward and natural style. But it
happens that certain great writers who
lived some time ago, and were famous exam-
ples of "directness," have expressed them-
selves in the speech of their own period.
Stevenson rejects his own style as not good
enough for him, not direct enough, not un-
conscious enough ; he will have theirs. And
so he goes out in quest of purity and truth,
and brings home an elaborate archaism.

Although we think of Stevenson as a
writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is
due in great measure to his innumerable
235

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

essays and bits of biography and autobiog-
raphy, his letters, his journals, and travels and
miscellaneous reminiscences.

It was his own belief that he was a very
painstaking and conscientious artist, and this
is true to a great extent. On the day of his
death he was engaged upon the most highly
organized and ambitious thing he ever at-
tempted, and every line of it shows the hand
of an engraver on steel. But it is also true
that during the last years of his life he lived
under the pressure of photographers and
newspaper syndicates, who came to him with
great sums of money in their hands. He was
exploited by the press of the United States,
and this is the severest ordeal which a writer
of English can pass through. There was one
year in which he earned four thousand pounds.
His immeasurable generosity kept him forever
under the harrow in money matters, and added
another burden to the weight carried by this
dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder
that some of his work is trivial. The wonder
is that he should have produced it at all.

The journalistic work of Stevenson, begin-
ning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters
afterwards published as Across the Plains, is
valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellish-
ment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that
236

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

in the letters Across the Plains the lights
were turned down. But, in truth, the light
is daylight. The letters have a freshness that
midnight oil could not have improved, and
this fugitive sketch is of more permanent in-
terest than all the polite essays he ever
wrote.

If we compare the earlier with the later
work of Stevenson as a magazine writer, we
are struck with the accentuation of his man-
nerisms. It is not a single style which grows
more intense, but his amazing skill in many
which has increased.

The following is a specimen of Stevenson's
natural style, and it would be hard to find a
better : —

" The day faded ; the lamps were lit ; a
party of wild young men, who got off next
evening at North Platte, stood together on
the stern platform singing The Sweet By-
. and- By with very tuneful voices; the chums
began to put up their beds; and it seemed
as if the business of the day were at an end.
But it was not so ; for the train stopping at
some station, the cars were instantly thronged
with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little
more than night-gear, some with stable lan-
terns, and all offering beds for sale."
237

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The following is from an essay written by-
Stevenson while under the influence of the
author of Rab and his Friends.

" One such face I now remember ; one
such blank some half a dozen of us labor to
dissemble. In his youth he was a most beau-
tiful person, most serene and genial by dispo-
sition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts.
Laughter attended on his coming. . . .
From this disaster like a spent swimmer he
came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money
and consideration ; creeping to the family he
had deserted ; with broken wing never more
to rise. But in his face there was the light
of knowledge that was new to it. Of the
wounds of his body he was never healed;
died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resig-
nation. Of his wounded pride we knew only
by his silence."

The following is in the sprightly style of
the eighteenth century : —

" Cockshot is a different article, but vastly
entertaining, and has been meat and drink to
me for many a long evening. His manner is
dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice
of words not much. The point about him is
his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You
can propound nothing but he has either a
theory about it ready made or will have one
238

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay
its timbers and launch it on the minute.
* Let me see/ he will say, ' give me a mo-
ment, I should have some theory for that.' "

But for serious matters this manner would
never do, and accordingly we find that, when
the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into
English as early as the time of James I.

Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his
smaller works to his physicians : —

"There are men and classes of men that
stand above the common herd : the soldier, the
sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently ;
the artist rarely ; rarelier still the clergyman ;
the physician almost as a rule. ... I forget
as many as I remember and I ask both to
pardon me, these for silence, those for inade-
quate speech."

After finishing off this dedication to his
satisfaction, Stevenson turns over the page
and writes a NOTE in the language of two
and one-half centuries later. He is now the
elegant litterateur of the last generation — ,
one would say James Russell Lowell : —

" The human conscience has fled of late
the troublesome domain of conduct for what
I should have supposed to be the less con-
genial field of art: there she may now be
said to rage, and with special severity in all
239

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

that touches dialect, so that in every novel
the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and
\ the reader wearied, to commemorate shades

of mispronunciation."

But in this last extract we are still three
degrees away from what can be done in the
line of gentility and delicate effeteness of
style. Take the following, which is the very
peach-blow of courtesy : —
\ " But upon one point there should be no

dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no
business in the arts. If he be not frugal he
steers directly for that last tragic scene of
le vieux saltimbanque ; if he be not frugal he
will find it hard to continue to be honest.
Some day when the butcher is knocking at
the door he may be tempted, he may be
obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece
of work. If the obligation shall have arisen
through no wantonness of his own, he is even
to be commended, for words cannot describe
how far more necessary it is that a man
should support his family than that he should
attain to — or preserve — distinction in the
arts," etc.

Now the very next essay to this is a sort
of intoned voluntary played upon the more
sombre emotions.

"What a monstrous spectre is this man,
240

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting
alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber;
killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small
copies of himself; grown upon with hair like
grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter
in his face ; a thing to set children scream-
ing; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as
his fellows know him, how surprising are his
attributes."

There is a tincture of Carlyle in this mix-
ture. There are a good many pages of Gothic
type in the later essays, for Stevenson thought
it the proper tone in which to speak of death,
duty, immortality, and such subjects as that.
He derived this impression from the works
of Sir Thomas Browne. But the solemnity
of Sir Thomas Browne is like a melodious
thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing.

" Time sadly overcometh all things and is
now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and
looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while
his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous
upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, mak-
ing puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning
old glories into dreams. History sinketh
beneath her cloud. The traveller as he
passeth through these deserts asketh of her
'who builded them?' And she mumbleth
something, but what it is he heareth not."
16 241

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The frenzy to produce something like this
sadly overcomes Stevenson, in his later es-
says. But perhaps it were to reason too
curiously to pin Stevenson down to Browne.
All the old masters stalk like spectres through
his pages, and among them are the shades of
the moderns, even men that we have dined
with.

According to Stevenson, a certain kind of
subject requires a certain " treatment," and
the choice of his tone follows his title. These
" treatments " are always traditional, and even
his titles tread closely on the heels of former
titles. He can write the style of Charles
Lamb better than Lamb could do it himself,
and his Hazlitt is very nearly as good. He
fences with his left hand as well as with his
right, and can manage two styles at once like
Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from the
7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined
about it.

It is with a pang of disappointment that we
now and then come across a style which we
recognize, yet cannot place.

People who take enjoyment in the reminis-
cences awakened by conjuring of this kind
can nowhere in the world find a master like
Stevenson. Those persons belong to the
bookish classes. Their numbers are insigni-
242

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

ficant, but they are important because they
give countenance to the admiration of others
who love Stevenson with their hearts and
souls.

The reason why Stevenson represents a
backward movement in literature, is that
literature lives by the pouring into it of new
words from speech, and new thoughts from
life, and Stevenson used all his powers to
exclude both from his work. He lived and
wrote in the past. That this Scotchman
should appear at the end of what has been
a very great period of English literature, and
summarize the whole of it in his two hours'
traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place
in the history of that literature. He is the
Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is im-
possible to assign him rank in any line of
writing. If you shut your eyes to try and
place him, you find that you cannot do it.
The effect he produces while we are reading
him vanishes as we lay down the book, and
we can recall nothing but a succession of
flavors. It is not to be expected that pos-
terity will take much interest in him, for his
point and meaning are impressional. He is
ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the
mistletoe of English literature whose roots
are not in the soil but in the tree.
243

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

But enough of the nature and training of
Stevenson which fitted him to play the part
he did. The cyclonic force which turned him
from a secondary London novelist into some-
thing of importance and enabled him to give
full play to his really unprecedented talents
will be recognized on glancing about us.

We are now passing through the age of
the Distribution of Knowledge. The spread
of the English-speaking race since 1850, and
the cheapness of printing, have brought in
primers and handbooks by the million. All
the books of the older literatures are being
abstracted and sown abroad in popular edi-
tions. The magazines fulfil the same func-
tion ; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia.
Andrew Lang heads an army of organized
workers who mine in the old literature and
coin it into booklets and cash.

The American market rules the supply of
light literature in Great Britain. While Lang
culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the
Norse or Provencal, Stevenson will engage to
supply us with tales and legends of his own —
something just as good. The two men serve
the same public.

Stevenson's reputation in England was that
of a comparatively light weight, but his suc-
cess here was immediate. We hailed him
244

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

as a classic — or something just as good.
Everything he did had the very stamp and
trademark of Letters, and he was as strong
in one department as another. We loved
this man; and thenceforward he purveyed
" literature " to us at a rate to feed sixty
millions of people and keep them clamoring
for more.

Does any one believe that the passion of
the American people for learning and for
antiquity is a slight and accidental thing?
Does any one believe that the taste for imita-
tion old furniture is a pose? It creates an
eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is
a power like Niagara, and represents the sin-
cere appreciation of half educated people for
second rate things. There is here nothing
to be ashamed of. In fact there is every-
thing to be proud of in this progress of the
arts, this importation of culture by the carload.
The state of mind it shows is a definite and
typical state of mind which each individual
passes through, and which precedes the dis-
covery that real things are better than sham.
When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hun-
dred thousand dollars' worth of Louis XV.
furniture to be made — and most well made
— in Buffalo, and when the American public
gives Stevenson an order for Pulvis et Umbra
245

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

— the same forces are at work in each case.
It is Chicago making culture hum.

And what kind of a man was Stevenson?
Whatever may be said about his imitative-
ness, his good spirits were real. They are at
the bottom of his success, the strong note in his
work. They account for all that is paradoxi-
cal in his effect. He often displays a senti-
mentalism which has not the ring of reality.
And yet we do not reproach him. He has
by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest
form revealed the scepticism inherent in
them. And yet we know that he was not a
sceptic ; on the contrary, we like him, and he
was regarded by his friends as little lower
than the angels.

Why is it that we refuse to judge him by
his own utterances? The reason is that all
of his writing is playful, and we know it.
The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry
is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and
questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence
our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who
turns into bright fire and then into running
water under our hands. The truth is that
as a literary force, there was no such man
as Stevenson ; and after we have racked our
brains to find out the mechanism which has
been vanquishing the chess players of Europe,
246

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a
pale boy.

But the courage of this boy, the heroism of
his life, illumine all his works with a per-
sonal interest. The last ten years of his life
present a long battle with death.

We read of his illnesses, his spirit ; we hear
how he never gave up, but continued his
works by dictation and in dumb show when
he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak
to speak. This courage and the lovable
nature of Stevenson won the world's heart.
He was regarded with a peculiar tenderness
such as is usually given only to the young.
Honor, and admiration mingled with affec-
tion followed him to his grave. Whatever his
artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual
nature in his work. It was this nature
which made him thus beloved.

247

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